Understanding Tourist Diaspora: An Interdisciplinary Mixed Mode Design Documenting Greek Tourist Diaspora

Even though diaspora tourists are significant contributors to the economies of people’s origins they are largely inconspicuous in tourism marketing deliberations. This is despite three growing trends challenging conventional tourism deliberations. First, diaspora tourists are increasingly becoming visible as ‘silent’ contributors to the national economies. Second, their contributions are recognized as benefiting the ‘informal’ sector. Third, they are growing in numbers due to increased migrations. Such conspicuous silence calls for a need to innovate thinking to harness the growing diaspora tourist contributions. This paper calls for recognizing the tourist diaspora as an emerging market and espouses the benefits of making the tourist diaspora visible. It is premised on a belief that understanding diaspora tourist and their traits would provide the basis for developing novel approaches to marketing, and for examining the role of use of innovative technologies for linking diaspora tourism and their economic contributions in a sustained manner. Work reported in this paper is an extension of earlier work by the authors [Vemuri et al. (Greek diaspora and economic recovery, 2015); Vemuri et al. (Perspectives on Hellenic Diaspora. Charles Darwin University Press, 2018)] and is based on the results from a mixed mode survey of aggregate tourist behavior based on 147 responses. The paper suggests the relevance of applying an interdisciplinary framework for tourism marketing activities associated with identified behavioral traits of Greek diaspora tourists.