Navigating challenges: coping, memory, and the interpretations of travel adversities among middle-aged and older Chinese adults

Despite growing multidisciplinary attention to coping and negative emotions, the relationship between tourists’ coping and recollection of travel memories remains largely underexplored. This research adopts a biographical approach to collect and analyse the travel histories of 32 middle-aged and older Chinese tourists, focusing on how they recall and interpret unforeseen and challenging travel situations, their coping strategies, and the outcomes. From these narratives, we identify five distinct coping characters with each characterised by specific strategies employed, unique coping context, level of effort involved, and evolving interpretations of negative encounters in their trips. These archetypes demonstrate the complex interaction between tourists’ personal traits, such as life histories, adopted social norms, cultural values, and coping mechanisms in shaping the recollection and interpretation of travel memories. The findings suggest that the connections between coping and remembering are more nuanced than previously assumed. The process of coping plays a crucial role in recalling the details of challenges in tourism, further shaping the meaning, vividness, and longevity of travel memories. Our study bridges the gap between coping theory, memory, and travel experience, and offers a dynamic perspective that highlights the fluidity and complexity of individuals’ coping practices in tourism.