Case Study 3: Post-Trip Well-Being

You have read how a variety of techniques can be used to enhance post-trip memories and reflections. Now you will have a chance to apply some of the ideas presented in Part III of the book to a hypothetical case study. Doing this will allow you to more actively work with the concepts you have learned about and to integrate them more effectively to solve real-life type travel dilemmas. As before, there are no right or wrong answers, so do not be held back by searching for the so-called right solution. Just draw on your own experiences and use the frameworks that were provided to you to try to critically analyze the case. This case is called Your Ski Vacation.

Your Ski Vacation

For this exercise, imagine that you are in the middle of a one-week trip to a ski lodge in Austria. Although you had never skied before, the lodge where you are staying offered a beginner’s course in skiing, which you are taking along with five other guests at the lodge. This course is turning out to be enormous fun for you, although you are not really learning to ski very well. The lodge has a pub restaurant on the premises, and every night they have what they call Singing Evenings where all of the guests gather by the fire and are led in song by the owner of the hotel who is an accomplished folk singer. You have attended all of these sing-alongs and are having a great time, in general, on this trip. The food has been fantastic and the conversation with other guests has been lively. Because of all of this, you want to be able to particularly savor and relish the memories of your special vacation when you return home.

Using the information presented in the preceding chapters in Part III on enhancing post-trip reflections and your own experience as a traveler or travel professional, brainstorm about all the things that you could do to refresh your later memories of this wonderful trip. What specific strategies would you employ to facilitate this? What types of things could you do or what could you collect or gather to preserve the freshness of your experiences? How could the lodge managers and other people in the travel industry whom you met on your trip help you in this task? Please discuss and be as specific as you can in your responses. Again there are no correct or incorrect answers.

Notes