A Netnography of Goal Pursuit in Retirement Travel

Abstract

As millions of baby boomers approach retirement, they will face one of the most significant and potentially life-altering decisions they’ve ever made – the pursuit of a travel-based retirement lifestyle. When people make such high-stakes decisions it is inevitable that their salient desires are engaged and likely that goal conflicts will arise. An extensive literature has focused on understanding travelers’ motivations, but this research has rarely examined how people cope with the conflicts that are inherent in travel decisions. Retirement provides a perfect natural context to study such decisions. In this study we use netnography – a method of observing online consumer-to-consumer communications – to discern the tensions that arise when aspiring travelers’ goals are in conflict. Furthermore, we investigate how experienced travelers in the online community offer aspiring travelers moral support, advice and referrals that help to resolve these goal conflicts, thus easing decision-making tension and moving the decision-maker closer to the choice of a travel-based lifestyle. The findings offer a better understanding of multiple goal pursuit in retirement travel, where (1) desires serve as superordinate goals that are engaged in travel planning, (2) retiree travelers juggle multiple goals that often result in goal conflicts and (3) the importance of online community in providing advice as proposed solutions to achieve goals and resolve goal conflicts. Lastly, implications and limitations of this study are discussed.