Third International Conference on Tourism & Leisure Studies

Abstract

Visiting friends and relatives (VFR) is the prime motive for travelling and has been considered as the most regular and significant contributor to the tourism industry. From a research perspective, immigrants’ relationships with and perceptions of their fellow countrymen, cultures, and their motherland environments have always been studied by tourism researchers, who are interested in the human experience tourism as opposed to leisure tourism. As a result, the relationship between immigrants and their friends and relatives which is sustained by visits has been comprehensively studied over the past decades. Nevertheless, the investigation of the perceptions of the children of immigrants of their relatives and their native countries is a rather current field of investigation. Of interest of this current study, for instance, a recent research on second-generation Chinese migrants to the United States shows that these travellers seem interested in embracing both the modern and traditional aspects of China to experience feelings of proximity to Chinese traditions, histories, and the rest of their families living in mainland China. To shed more light on second-generation migrants’ perceptions of their homeland and their desire to travel to their native countries, this qualitative study reports on the perceptions of second-generation Indian, Iranian, and Filipino-Kiwi migrants and the factors that influenced these perceptions. The findings generally support the findings of previous studies and the most striking observation that emerged from the data comparison was the role of parents in shaping their children’s perceptions of their motherland.