Insights Into the Motivations, Practice, and Relationality of Dementia Care During Travel

Abstract

While tourism scholars have increasingly considered the rising prevalence of dementia and its intersection with tourism, this work has largely been approached through a functional, supply-side lens, emphasising industry responses and dementia-friendly provision. Although valuable, this focus offers limited insight into how dementia can challenge the assumption of independence in tourism, often rendering travel possible only through the presence and labour of a caring companion, usually an informal caregiver, shaping how care is experienced and negotiated while travelling. Understanding care as both a practice and an ethic is therefore essential to conceptualising tourism as a meaningful site for ‘living well’ with dementia. Guided by interpretive phenomenology and informed by ethics of care, a sample of informal caregivers in New Zealand participated in semi-structured phone/online interviews. Preliminary thematic analysis revealed three interrelated themes. Motivations for Travel reveals informal caregivers’ motivations for travelling with a person living with dementia, focusing on considerations about (non)participation and the effort to sustain identity, relationships, and shared meaning amidst the emotional and practical demands of care. Caregiving in Practice reveals the functional elements of dementia caregiving during travel, including planning, managing logistical challenges, maintaining routines, vigilance, and adapting to unfamiliar environments, highlighting how tourism intensifies and makes practical care work visible. Relationality of Care reveals the moral and relational dimensions of caregiving during travel, showing how decisions are shaped by perceived duty and relational responsibility to uphold dignity, maintain shared travel identities, and navigate social judgment and stigma. By integrating interpretive phenomenology, ethics of care, and theories of personhood and couplehood, this study situates dementia care during travel as a morally and relationally significant practice. Travel decisions and experiences are shaped by moral obligations, relational interdependencies, and the negotiation of identity and shared meaning. Findings provide original insight into how tourism participation is either constrained or enabled, highlighting the needs, wellbeing, and relational realities of both people living with dementia and their informal caregivers, and offering directions for research and practice to support inclusive, ethically informed, and meaningful tourism experiences.