Family-based travel narratives: Confirmatory personal introspection of children’s interpretations of their journey to three destinations

An extensive review of the literature indicates a very limited amount of empirical investigation on consumer psychology in tourism benefitting from travel narratives or storytelling. This paper therefore tries to uncover how visitors are likely to interpret the places, people and situations that they personally experience while travelling to three destinations: Dubai, Hong Kong, and Macau. Departing from theories on confirmatory personal introspection that suggest the use of multiple methods, this methodology employed in this study consists of the personal observation of the researcher (etic) and verbal and written expressions and memories of two members of a single family (emic) during the summer of 2014. The study contributes to the literature by offering a wider perspective of subjects in terms of visitor behaviour, tourism marketing and travel narratives.