Tourism and the pursuit of subjective wellbeing: A temporal perspective

The figure shows a teahouse post in Lijiang Old Town to invite people for tea and enjoy slowdown. By spending time without utilitarian purposes, tourists can rejuvenate themselves and experience the meaning of time. This is the rejuvenation of time by space. The pursuit of subjective wellbeing (SWB) via tourism has been well recognised. Little has been done to unpack how tourists engage in a different pace of life, generally from speedup at home to slowdown in destinations, to pursue wellbeing. Drawing upon a theoretical framework based on the established literature on SWB and the temporality of tourism, this paper examines the pursuit of wellbeing by tourists who engage in what we call temporal retreat. The case study is Lijiang Old Town, a well known destination in Yunnan province, China. Specifically, this paper examines how a group of domestic independent tourists experience slowdown and relaxation in Lijiang as a favourable contrast to the bustling rhythm at home. We ask the following research questions: In what ways can temporal retreat help tourists to enhance wellbeing? To what extent does the pursuit of wellbeing via tourism further a temporal understanding of the therapeutic qualities of tourist destinations? We argue that the experiences of slowdown by tourists in destinations can bolster therapeutic forms of social and spatial orchestration—an explicit marking of time in contrast to speedup—for the purpose of enjoying comfort and enhancing wellbeing. As such, an analysis of tourism through a temporal perspective offers a rich milieu for both interrogating the need for alternative temporalities to improve the quality of life and extending the literature on subjective wellbeing into the terrain of tourism consumption.