Even when people travel to the same country, their trips can look completely different. Some follow a guide holding a flag around set sights and eat dinner at a Korean restaurant. Others carry nothing but a backpack, stay in locals’ homes, and eat the same meals they do. They are all travelers, so why do they choose such different paths? A classic framework that explains this difference is “Cohen’s Tourist Typology.”
Simply put, Cohen’s Tourist Typology is “a classification that divides tourists into four types according to whether they want more familiarity or more novelty.” It was first proposed by Erik Cohen, a sociologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel, in his 1972 paper “Toward a Sociology of International Tourism,” published in the journal Social Research.
In this article, we will look in turn at the ideas of familiarity and novelty that underlie this classification, the traits of the four types of tourists, examples from everyday life, and the significance and limits this theory has left behind.
Four Types of Travelers, Divided by Familiarity and Novelty
Familiarity, Novelty, and the Environmental Bubble
Cohen believed that every trip mixes two impulses pulling in opposite directions.
(1) The desire for novelty
People leave home to experience unfamiliar scenery and cultures and to taste food for the first time. Seeing and feeling things different from everyday life is the greatest joy travel offers.
(2) The pull of familiarity
But an environment that is too strange also brings anxiety and fatigue. When travelers cannot make themselves understood or the food does not suit them, they start looking for familiar things again.
(3) The environmental bubble
Cohen called the protective shell that lets travelers keep enjoying their home way of life even in a strange place the “environmental bubble.” Guides who speak their language, restaurants serving the food they always eat, and hotels that look much the same anywhere in the world make up this bubble. Cohen’s idea was that the character of a trip changes depending on how much the traveler stays inside this bubble.
The Traits of the Four Tourist Types
Cohen divided travelers into four stages, from the side with the most familiarity to the side with the most novelty.
- Organized Mass Tourist: Buys a package tour and moves according to a pre-arranged itinerary. A guide leads the way and accommodation and meals are all decided in advance, so they stay inside the environmental bubble for the whole trip.
- Individual Mass Tourist: Arranges accommodation and flights through a travel agency but is not tied to a group and sets the itinerary to some extent on their own. Even so, they mostly use well-known sights and facilities.
- Explorer: Plans the trip alone and seeks out places people rarely go. They mix with locals and try to learn the local language, but they do not give up comfortable lodging and reliable transportation.
- Drifter: Wanders without a fixed plan and goes deep into local society. They deliberately avoid facilities for tourists and choose to work, eat, and sleep like the locals.
Cohen grouped the first two types as “institutionalized tourism,” which follows the framework set up by the tourism industry, and the last two as “non-institutionalized tourism,” which breaks away from that framework. Moving down the list, familiarity decreases and novelty increases.
The Four Types in Everyday Life
The four types are easy to spot in the trips taken by people around us.
A Group Tour with Your Parents
A trip where you meet a guide at the airport, tour famous temples and markets by chartered bus, and have dinner at a Korean restaurant in the evening is close to the organized mass tourist. There is no worry about getting lost and it is comfortable, but there are few chances to meet locals.
An Office Worker on an Independent Trip
A traveler who buys a package bundling only flights and a hotel and spends the day looking at a map app to find famous streets and popular restaurants is an individual mass tourist.
A Travel Writer Visiting a Remote Village
Someone who visits a mountain village that is hard to reach and chats with the residents, but rests at a clean guesthouse at night, is close to an explorer.
A Long-Term Traveler Staying for Months
A long-term traveler who helps out on a farm in exchange for room and board and spends time with local friends shows the profile of a drifter.
The Theory’s Significance and Limits
Cohen’s classification became an important starting point for tourism studies because it made people see tourists not as a single mass but as people with different motives and behaviors.
(1) It helps us understand how destinations change
A remote village that at first only explorers and drifters visited often turns into a tourist spot crowded with mass tourists once word of the route spreads and lodgings and restaurants open. By looking at which types of travelers visit most, you can guess what stage a destination is at.
(2) People are not fixed to one type
The same person may travel like a drifter when young and like a group tourist when traveling with children. Because the way people travel changes with the destination, companions, age, and experience, the types should not be seen as labels attached to people.
(3) It cannot capture the meaning of travel
This classification shows well what travelers do, but it does not fully explain what travel means to each person. Cohen himself broadened his thinking in a 1979 paper, dividing tourist experiences anew into five modes: recreational, diversionary, experiential, experimental, and existential.
Cohen’s Tourist Typology is not a yardstick that sorts travelers into good and bad, but a map that shows how each person balances familiarity and novelty in an unfamiliar place. Both the comfort of a group tour and the freedom of wandering alone have their own value.
When you plan your next trip, asking yourself how much you want to stay inside the environmental bubble is the first step in tourism studies toward finding the kind of travel that suits you.
