Laurie Wu

Transformative tourism experiences are powerful life moments with the capacity to elevate individuals’ well-being. With the rise of transformative tourism and the growing attention to well-being, theoretical research is needed to outline the underlying processes that connect transformative tourism experiences with individual well-being. This study employed grounded theory to critically analyze a set of travel blogs that narrate individual tourists’ transformative tourism experiences. Specifically, we explored how sets of activities during transformative tourism (e.g., backpacker tourism, volunteer tourism, and study tours) contributed to travelers’ hedonic and eudaimonic well-being. We took psychological needs as processes of well-being realization to construct an integrated “activities–needs–well-being” conceptual framework to demonstrate how transformative tourism contributes to travelers’ hedonic and eudaimonic well-being.