The Tourist Itinerary Travel Loop: historical and contemporary travel characteristics

• Main Author: Lundgren, Jan O.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: French
• Published: Presses de l'Université du Québec 2003
• Subjects: North Atlantic cruise; travel loop; Viking; geo; archi; Pacific; North Atlantic
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/teoros/1797

In today’s tourist travel, the travel loop represents a very popular itinerary design, although the circumstances under which it is applied, as well as its geographic scale, often differ from the grandiose loop designs of centuries past. During the past couple of decades, a popular kind of new travel has emerged, the cruise-ship travel phenomenon, which often is arranged as quite an extensive itinerary loop. . However, the cruises can also be transoceanic, even global, with the tourist flying out to the port hub, joining the cruise, and having his/her return flight waiting at the final cruise port of call. That is a common arrangement for truly “long haul,” “long duration” open sea voyages, be they across the Pacific, involving Atlantic crossings, or the South Seas in general. Among the various loop itineraries involving cruise travel, the presently operating North Atlantic Viking Heritage voyages, transatlantic crossings, are newcomers on the tourist market, especially if one compares them with Caribbean cruises or the classical Mediterranean equivalent of, for that matter, the Baltic Sea cruises of the late 40’s and 50’s, all of which have been operating since the early 70’s (Lundgren, 1994). However, it is only in the past decade that the North Atlantic Viking Heritage has been recognized as an up-and-coming international tourist attraction of major dimensions, which today warrants its keen interest from cruise line companies. The Viking North Atlantic Heritage represents an exciting historical resource for contemporary tourism, especially in the form of cruise ship operations and new cruise routes. The fact that the heritage is far flung, transatlantic, and usually difficult to access, makes the tourist attraction even more tantalizing and adventure-coloured, especially in a shrinking world, where most attractions are easy to come by. However, considering the archeologically- and historically-evidenced Vikings, improvements could be made, especially as regards the way the heritage is used as a tourist ...