The tourism expert who leads the world in understanding how we travel

And what strangers mean to us.

If you’ve ever travelled alone for weeks or months at a time, you’ll know that the relationships you form along the way tend to stick with you long after you’ve returned home.

Just as we surround ourselves with our closest friends and family in our regular lives, as tourists, we can’t help but form ‘tribes’ with other travellers who are chasing the same experiences as us.

It’s known as neo-tribalism, and it’s not just fascinating from an anthropological standpoint – it’s the kind of insight around which an entire tourism enterprise can be built.

“We think of people as going away in couples and families, and staying fixed in their groups as they travel, but in recent years we’ve realised that tourists love to socialise and share experiences, and they're influenced by the people they meet,” says Anne Hardy, Associate Professor of Tourism and Sociology in the School of Social Sciences, and a world leader in sustainable tourism research.

'They form a little tribe, and if you understand how these tribes work, you can market your products to tailor to their experience.”

Through her years working with tourist groups around the world, Associate Professor Hardy has seen this behaviour in everything from caravan parks and gay tourism resorts, to Antarctic expeditions and Alaskan campsites.

“When I was researching RVers [people travelling in motor homes, caravans, and tent trailers] in Alaska and Canada, I saw that these travellers formed strong ‘tribes’ at the campsites, and even had their own rituals, like happy hour at 5pm. They swapped stories, gave recommendations, emailed each other afterwards – they acted as a tribe,” she says.

“It becomes a market segment in a way. How we behave when we travel, the experiences we have, the communities we form in hostels – if we’re not marketing to these, it’s a big area that’s being missed.”

Associate Professor Hardy specialises in gathering insights that will not only help the tourism industry succeed, but also show them how to promote sustainable tourism – the idea that if a tourist is going to have an impact on the places they go, it should be a positive one.

She first made her mark on the industry with her 2001 PhD project, which highlighted a key problem with tourism in Queensland’s Daintree Rainforest at the time: large segments of the community were not on board with what was going on around them.

The insights gained from her research proved so valuable, her report became one of the most highly cited tourism papers in the world.

“Sustainability often focuses on environment and business, but often ignores the community,” says Associate Professor Hardy.

“We weren’t looking at the impact that tourism can have on people’s livelihoods and their sense of place as a community. It was early work in recognising that if the community is offside, it won’t provide a good tourism experience.”

Associate Professor Hardy is now running an ongoing research project called Tourism Tracer, which is the first in the world to track tourists for the duration of their trips.

After getting the tourists on board, she teamed up with Tasmanian website designer, Ionata Digital, to distribute devices that record things like when and where the tourists stop, the speed they’re driving, and who’s using overcrowded car parks during peak visitation times.

The information is visualised by the online Tourism Tracer Dashboard for anyone to access, and has been so transformative for the industry that Associate Professor Hardy was invited to speak at the United Nation’s 2017 World Tourism Organisation conference in Botswana.

“Now those in the tourism industry can finally understand how to market to these people, or help them move through national parks, for example. It’s all of those amazing details that the industry is really interested in,” she says.

In her current role as Director of the Tourism Research and Education Network (TRENd), Associate Professor Hardy is also helping other academics connect with industry partners to share their research – something that happens less often than it should.

“When I first started as Director in 2013, we were collectively stunned that there was this large amount of research at the University, but we weren’t working with industry,” she says.

“That really guides my approach to research – we’re building theories, but it’s about the ability to transfer this knowledge to the industry, and making sure it’s relevant.”

Research that makes a difference