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This case study focuses on the forms of social life that emerge at the intersection between travel and technology. Focusing on three empirical examples of interactive travel--couchsurfers, travel bloggers, and worldschoolers--the case presents an innovative methodological approach called mobile virtual ethnography. This case will describe how mobile virtual ethnography adapts conventional ethnographic techniques, such as immersion and participant observation, to the study of mobile social life and enables researchers to gain a deeper understanding of how individuals and communities interact both online and on the move.

Tourism, technology and togetherness in a mobile world -- Fieldwork on the move: mobile virtual ethnography -- Landscape: connecting to place, connected places -- Gaze: mobilizing and mediating the tourist gaze -- Hospitality: the mobile conviviality of couchsurfing -- Authenticity: representation, commodification, and re-enchantment -- Escape: unplugging from modernity -- Peforming mobile sociality

Living in a world that is increasingly 'on the move' means that many of us now rely on mobile devices, social media, and networking technologies to coordinate togetherness with our social networks even when we are apart. Nowhere is this phenomenon more evident than in the emerging practices of 'interactive travel'. Today's travellers are more likely than ever to pack a laptop or a mobile phone and to use these devices to stay in touch with friends and family members, as well as to connect with strangers and other travellers, while they are on the road. New practices such as location-aware navigating, travel blogging, flashpacking and Couchsurfing now shape the way travellers engage with each other, with their social networks, and with the world around them. Travel Connections prompts a rethinking of the key paradigms in tourism studies in the digital age. Interactive travel calls into question longstanding tourism concepts such as landscape, the tourist gaze, hospitality, authenticity and escape. The book proposes a range of new concepts to describe the way tourists inhabit the world and engage with their social networks in the twenty-first century: smart tourism, the mediated gaze, mobile conviviality, re-enchantment and embrace. Based on intensive fieldwork with interactive travellers, this book offers a detailed account of this emerging phenomenon and uncovers the new forms of mediated and face-to-face togetherness that become possible in a mobile world.

Abstract
Tourists are increasingly turning to peer-to-peer platforms such as Airbnb to arrange homestays in their destinations. For better or for worse, these forms of network hospitality are transforming the hospitality landscape, with critical repercussions for home owners, residential neighbourhoods, local economies, urban planners and company investors and executives. These stakeholders often frame their discussion of the benefits and drawbacks of network hospitality in scalar terms. The article begins by analysing the discursive construction of spatial scales, spanning from the private enclaves of hosts' homes, to the public spaces of neighbourhoods and cities, to the global imaginary implied in Airbnb's motto 'Belong Anywhere'. It then asks how temporal and digital scales are also invoked in discourse about Airbnb, and with what ethical and political implications. Drawing on scholarly research, newspaper articles and corporate marketing materials, the analysis reflects critically on how scale is deployed to assert power, assign moral responsibility, and make claims to belonging in the context of network hospitality.

Abstract

Abstract

This article introduces a collection of ethnographies that develop innovative theoretical and methodological approaches to CouchSurfing.com, a free online hospitality exchange network. The growing popularity of CouchSurfing poses significant questions about the way hospitality is performed
in an era of digital communications, online social networking and alternative travel. The studies in this issue bring fresh insights to the sociological and cultural significance of hospitality in a networked world by offering detailed accounts of the new possibilities and new problems that
emerge when complete strangers encounter one another online and accommodate one another offline. This article introduces the concept of 'network hospitality' to highlight some of the features that make CouchSurfing and similar social networking sites such a compelling topic of research for
critical hospitality studies.

This article aims to respond to recent calls for more material accounts of cosmopolitanism by considering the way the cosmopolitan sensibilities of flexibility, adaptability, tolerance and openness to difference are literally embodied by a specific group of mobile subjects. Drawing on a study of round-the-world travellers and the 'body stories' they publish in their online travelogues, this article explores the various ways travellers embody cosmopolitanism through the concept of 'fit'. Fit refers both to the physical condition required for long-haul travel and to the ability to blend in and adapt to a variety of geographical and cultural environments. By focusing on the way cosmopolitanism is literally embodied, the empirical account offered here draws attention to the notion that cosmopolitanism is not just an abstract, materially iterated orientation to the world as a whole.

The "flexible eye" describes a particularly cosmopolitan perspective derived through mobility, detachment & multiplicity as opposed to rooted-ness or national affiliation. In this article, I explore the extent to which the "flexible eye" serves as an apt metaphor for the spatial & civic affiliations enacted by round-the-world travellers. The discussion here is based on research that examines the narratives travellers publish online while travelling around the world. Drawing on recent academic work on cosmopolitanism & global citizenship, I investigate the way a discourse of cosmopolitan citizenship circulates in these narratives. In particular, I examine the way travellers frame these related activities -- moving around the world & sharing their experiences via the Internet -- in terms of civic responsibility. Travellers respond to a sense of obligation to produce tolerance, interconnectedness & cultural understanding out of encounters with difference. This formulation of a round-the-world trip as a civic obligation entails movement not only around the world, but also between national & global scales of belonging. How is cosmopolitan belonging filtered through practices of national citizenship? How are travellers both detaching from & re-attaching to notions of national identity in their quest for the "flexible eye" of the cosmopolitan citizen? References. Adapted from the source document.

Introduction : mobilizing and mooring hospitality / Jennie Germann Molz and Sarah Gibson -- Seville to Hackney : a photographic journey / Elly Clarke -- Moments of hospitality / David Bell -- Hospitality and migrant memory in Maxwell Street, Chicago / Tim Cresswell -- Cosmopolitans on the couch : mobile hospitality and the Internet / Jennie Germann Molz -- Sensing and performing hospitalities and socialities of tourist places : eating and drinking out in Harrogate and Whitehaven / Viv Cuthill -- Hospitality, kinesthesis and health : Swedish spas and the market for well-being / Tom O'Dell -- Resident hosts and mobile strangers : temporary exchanges within the topography of the commercial home / Paul Lynch, Maria Di Dimenico, Majella Sweeney -- Hospitality in flames : queer immigrants and melancholic belonging / Adi Kuntsman -- 'Abusing our hospitality' : inhospitableness and the politics of deterrence / Sarah Gibson -- Hospitality and the limitations of the national / Karima Laachir -- Figures of Oriental hospitality : nomads and sybarites / Judith Still

Abstract

This was the editorial for the first issue of Hospitality & Society, published in 2011. It has been reprinted to help contextualize the reflections in this 10-year anniversary issue, which consider how the journal has evolved, how its contributions have advanced the study of hospitality and society, and the future for the journal and the field. The editorial provides a narrative review of the disparate ways that hospitality has been conceptualized and studied by different disciplines. It explores hospitality as social control, as social and economic exchange and as metaphor. The piece proposes an inter- and multi-disciplinary research agenda for hospitality studies, which encompasses diverse intellectual, philosophical, methodological, ethical and political perspectives. It concludes by outlining the journal's ambitions in fostering critical debate.

This editorial is the first of a two-part critical reflection upon the progress of Hospitality & Society in its first ten years in relation to the original aims and ambitions. Drawing primarily upon the Dimensions database, a field of research analysis indicates the journal achieving multidisciplinary coverage through its publications with the four most popular fields being: studies in human society; sociology; commerce, management, tourism and services; business and management. The wide range of authors' disciplines and subjects suggests the metaphor of hospitality is mobilizing meanings across disciplines, geographies and sectors of hospitality studies. Academic journals and books publishing papers citing articles from Hospitality & Society further reflect the breadth of the journal's impact and reach and the relevance of hospitality to many aspects of society. Evolution of the journal is considered in relation to the editorial team's structure as well as that of the editorial and advisory boards' composition, acknowledging implications for the types of knowledge generated. The goal of inclusivity is considered in relation to language and contributing authors' geographical distribution. An interdisciplinary turn in hospitality studies is noted. Key steps in the journal's development are noted in relation to sponsorship, journal quality grading and its implications, as well as the importance of the publisher's values. The editors give thanks to all those involved.