The need to re-envision alternative paradigms in tourism is becoming evident with the increasingly experienced climate change and degradation of life supporting ecosystem services, to which the tourism industry has a significant adverse contribution. Could tourism be re-envisioned to bring positive effects on social, environmental and individual wellbeing? In this paper, we present the outcome of an extensive literature review and a cross-border post card workshop with researchers and tourism officials. Drawing on this, a conceptual framework of a comprehensive, relational idea of wellbeing tourism is proposed, that extends beyond our current notion of sustainability and the widely used and accepted triple bottom line model (TBL). The suggested model proposes a shift from focusing on sustainability alone, to giving increased attention and value to integral health and to life quality. The paper highlights that wellbeing tourism can only truly be reached when all its suggested six pillars are fulfilled in a relative balance among the community related external ones (environment, economy, social; “sustainability”) and those that may be experienced as individual (body, mind, soul). The importance of wellbeing tourism supporting a society with the governing characteristics of happiness, harmony, and abundance, building collaborative and regenerative systems are emphasised.

Hotel Anthropocene is a new hotel advertised as a luxury all-inclusive resort. It was until recently operated under the name of ´Hotel Holocene´, but due to the widespread attention the Anthropocene has received the new owners decided to change its name. The day at the Hotel Anthropocene, written in the form of fiction, renders different ways of knowing, feeling, sensing, conceptualizing, and practising real time ecological mutation. The guests are increasingly dissatisfied and they gradually realise that something is terribly wrong with the hotel. The dialogues and heated discussions take place in the hotel lobby, corridors, rooms, the pool-bar, the restaurant, the common room, and they disclose cognitive and emotional dissonances in relation to the future.

The chapter invites the reader to critically reflect upon tourism futures in relation to contemporary climate change and planetary ethics. It disrupts the idea of touristic bubbles without entanglements and responsibility with the ongoing crisis. The chapter also draws attention to a fundamental paradox of tourism, where search for wellbeing and hedonistic joy simultaneously contribute to accelerating climate change. The story at the hotel problematizes the conceptualization and practices of a ‘common future’, especially the future as a utopian time that lies ahead. Consequently, towards the end, the guests begin to realise that there is, unfortunately, no check-out from this hotel.

The story of Hotel Anthropocene also raises questions about our responsibilities as researchers and teachers when using fiction as method for producing and sharing knowledge of our current and future planetary situation in the Anthropocene. How do different kinds of stories tune us in, or out? What kinds of storytelling and story listening should we engage in if we wish to contribute to a more caring, sustainable, hospitable and peaceful co-existence in our one and only common “hotel” when cast in dire predictions of its planetary future?

Storytelling is a powerful way of exploring the past, crafting values in the present, and imagining the future. Stories, told from different perspectives and drawing from diverse experiences, can build shared understandings, empathy and care. Everyday stories of tourism - coping, success, empowerment, nurturing, disruption, relationship building and activism - are important tools that help students, teachers, researchers, practitioners and community members reflect and learn. The stories that we tell join the streams of wider narratives, shaping our understanding of the world and the ways in which we encounter it, thus providing a worldmaking function. Engaging in storytelling is anything but a benign activity as different narratives are continuously constituting and naturalizing the world and our relations with others. Tourism scholar Keith Hollinshead (2004) describes worldmaking as collaborative processes that essentialize and normalize peoples, places and practices. Hence, the notion of worldmaking calls for critical reflection on the ways in which stories enact, reinforce and alter power relationships by erasing alternative stories and by giving to voices in the margins. For us as tourism educators, storytelling unlock doors, opens new spaces for multiple ways of knowing and being, and moves towards more sustainable, hopeful, caring and ethical worldmaking in tourism.

In this paper, five authors account for the rethinking of a conference as a series of postcards, letters, rules and silent moments so that traditional hierarchies of knowledge could be overturned or, at least, sidelined. We recount how the place we convened was enlisted as an actor and the dramas and devices we applied to encounter it. We use this accounting to problematize the conventional practices of goal-oriented meetings and co-authored papers as forms of academic meaning-making. In finding a meeting point where expertise was disorientated and status undressed, we were able to investigate the idea of co-being between human and nonhuman realities as the step social theory needs to take to become a point of connection with the social world, instead of an escape from it. We conclude that this involved silence and necessary fictions as a means to consider the future and past in the moment of meeting.

There I was sitting on my Airport-hotel-room’s balcony, gathering sunbeams and breathing warm Mallorca air. I had the world’s biggest smile on my face: it felt almost surreal to be on this island for a tourism conference. I had lived here eleven years ago when I studied tourism at The University of the Balearic Islands and worked at a hotel by the Palmanova beach. Well, it merits mention that during that time I did not only fall in love with Palma and the entire island, but also with a fellow exchange-student from Sweden. What else could I have done but smile; I was back in amazing Mallorca, reading the 7th Critical Tourism Studies’ (CTS) conference programme and getting more and more excited about the forthcoming four days of conferencing.

The article illuminates one of the central ethical questions concerning tourist photography: the ways in which tourists photograph local people in tourist destinations. In line with the previous research on tourist photography, the study suggests that tourists’ experiences of responsible behaviour become continuously re-defined and negotiated in relations with others. Through a hermeneutic phenomenological analysis of tourists’ accounts, the study focusses on the role of the face in photography; that is, how encountering the face of the other interrupts the photographer and calls for heightened responsibility and reflection. Drawing on the Levinasian idea of ethics as being-for-the-other, the article visualizes relational ethics that do not originate from the tourist’s gaze, but from the face of the other.

Kan man använda begreppet ’gästfrihet’ om näringsidkare inom turismbranschen? Vad menar vi egentligen med ’gästfrihet’? Emily Höckert visar, att frågorna är komplicerade. Utmaningen består i hur vi ska beskriva mötet mellan människor.