Sensing transit. The role of senses in slow tourism

In recent decades, slow tourism, a form of tourism marked by a change in tourists’ mode of transit within or to a locality, has garnered attention. Slow tourism is the result of specific entanglements of people, transport infrastructure, technology, spaces, and landscapes that specifically promote the use of regional trains, bicycles, or walking. This article analyses the sensory aspects of slow tourism at the junction of mobilities and tourism studies, to better comprehend its transit. Transit is the “mobile” backstage of most tourist encounters and often originates from various means of conveyance whose sensory engagement has been little investigated. This study employs data from an Italian online survey that polled slow travellers. The survey sought to test slow tourism “theories”, and to deepen the embodied meanings of “slowing down” through the involvement of the senses. It examined slow tourist trips between 2020 and 2022, and also enabled a better understanding of how the COVID-19 pandemic affected this form of tourism. The findings were based on descriptive statistics and Natural Language Processing, including Semantic Network Analysis and topic detection. The results showed that slow tourism is often enacted through multi-modal transport modes, highlighting multifarious physical, mental, and sensory entanglements that are associated with nature and landscape. The different patterns of these entanglements denote different sensorial experiences of “slowing down” in tourism. The attainment of a more complete understanding of slow tourist transit, including its sensory features, will help policymakers to comprehend the phenomena, contributing to a more informed transition toward sustainability. Facilitating a more informed sustainability transition.