Beyond the Departure Gate: De-Anchoring Tourism Through Strategic Foresight

Tourism scholarship has long treated technological innovation as an accelerant bolted onto a stable practice: people move through physical space to consume experiences, then return home. This conceptual paper asks what happens to the field’s theory once that assumption is relaxed. Rather than forecasting a single future, the paper develops a structured conceptual foresight framework to examine how emerging technological trajectories may challenge the constitutive assumptions of tourism theory. Drawing on tourism scholarship alongside developments in computation, the biosciences, and cognitive science, the framework integrates established concepts from futures studies including Voros’s futures cone, Inayatullah’s causal layered analysis, and Dator’s four generic futures to explore alternative trajectories for tourism. This analysis identifies four constitutive assumptions on which tourism theory quietly rests, namely geographic displacement, embodied co-presence, the destination as passive stage, and the tourist–host dyad, together with a typology of de-anchoring that traces what becomes of the field as each assumption loosens. Four conceptual scenarios follow: the dematerialization of place, biologically mediated travel, autonomous destination ecosystems, and the erosion of the tourist–host distinction. Some sit in the cone’s plausible band; others are placed at its preposterous edge on purpose to stress-test the field’s categories rather than to predict events. Throughout, the analysis stays tethered to tourism and hospitality concerns: destination economics, the work of destination management organizations, labor displacement, experiential inequality, the measurement infrastructure behind tourism statistics, and the shift from sustainability toward regeneration. We close with a research agenda for an anticipatory, theory-building stream within the field.