Backpaking lifestyle
The succinct and less pejorative epithet ‘backpacker’ gained momentum from the late
1990s (O’Reilly, 2006) as a descriptor for predominantly young, budget tourists on extended
holiday (Loker-Murphy & Pearce, 1995). More recently, Maoz and Bekerman (2010, p. 426)
describe backpackers as ‘relatively young tourists who tend to gather in ghettos or enclaves:
places where large numbers congregate to experience home comforts and the company of
tourists of similar interests.’ This latter enclavic focus reflects an institutionalisation of the
backpacking phenomenon, a mainstreaming decried by some authors (Cohen, 2003; O’Reilly,
2006) for its alignment with the stigma of mass tourism. The homogenisation of backpacking
with the rubric of mass tourism, however, is derailed by scholarship that teases out
heterogeneity from within the backpacker umbrella concept (Ateljevic & Doorne, 2005;
Uriely, Yonay, & Simchai, 2002). Sørensen (2003) calls for continued research on specific
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