People travel solo to a destination due to different push–pull pre-travel motivators (Yoon and Uysal, 2005). Travel to a city destination brings a series of positive or negative experiences (Walls et al., 2011) and creates a sense of overall satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the destination and the travel itself. Also, several functional and psychosocial characteristics of a destination such as hosts, locals, services, prices (Echtner and Brent Ritchie, 1991; Philip, 2005), contribute to satisfaction with a trip, but also create destination loyalty among visitors (Chi and Qu, 2008; Zhang et al., 2014) and this loyalty in its turn leads to a return to the same destination. The phenomenon of solo travel to city destinations is an un-researched topic in Sweden. This exploratory study is the first in Sweden to focus on solo travellers visiting city destinations. The study aims to gain more insight into the phenomenon and attain more knowledge on the topic. The study employed a questionnaire consisting of qualitative and quantitative items. In all, 21 individuals (12 women, 9 men) responded. They were mostly well-educated, the majority were younger than 35, more than half were single and more than half reported travelling alone once or twice a year. The majority had a travel budget of SEK 10–20,000 per trip and the rest had a budget below SEK 10,000. They normally took flights and the majority went away for more than one week up to several weeks. The most important reason for solo travel was own free choice and in some cases difficulty finding companions. This result is coherent with earlier studies (e.g. Heimtun and Morgan, 2012; Mehmetoglu, 2004). Their loneliness gave rise to forced but positive socialization (e.g. Chiang and Jogaratnam, 2006; Laesser et al., 2009). Their activities at the destinations were mostly visiting attractions and they mostly mentioned advantages with solo travelling. They showed overall satisfaction with their travels, destination loyalty to one or several city destinations and wished to revisit them again and again. This finding is also partly or fully coherent with many earlier studies (e.g. Walls et al., 2011; Echtner and Brent Ritchie, 1991; Philip, 2005; Baloglu and McCleary, 1999; Beerli and Martin, 2004).
2018.
Advances in Destination Management, St.Gallen, Switzerland June 13-15, 2018.