Travel, Tinder and gender in digitally mediated tourism encounters

![CDATA[Popularly referred to as ‘Tinder Tourism’ within media commentary (Taylor, 2017), new dating technologies now permeate travel spaces and shape the sexual encounters travellers have with other travellers and people who live in the destinations they visit. Travel researchers have long acknowledged the link between sex and tourism where sex is not only accepted in contemporary tourism but is also integral to its economic structures and geopolitics (Leheny, 1995; Ryan & Hall, 2005). As dating apps such as Tinder penetrate travel and tourism landscapes, it becomes pertinent that we continue to question how their materiality makes and remakes the socio-cultural politics of gender, race, sexuality and nationality (Condie, Lean, & James, 2018), which govern who can have sex with whom, and under what circumstances, within the spheres of travel and tourism. The chapter commences with a literature review on the intersections between sex and tourism to situate the phenomenon of Tinder Tourism within the wider scope of a gendered and colonial global tourism industry. Following this, we analyse the User Experience Design of Tinder and explore how Tinder’s reproduction of gendered attitudes and behaviours maintains the exclusion of women from the perceptively ‘masculine’ practice of independent leisure travel. To explicate the digitally mediated sexualities of Tinder Tourism, we draw data from a social survey questionnaire (n = 112) and face-to-face interviews with self-identifying Tinder Tourists (n = 10). Our survey respondents come from 28 different countries to date but are predominantly Australian (39%), heterosexual (78%) and between the ages of 18 and 29 (77%). With regard to gender, 56% of participants identify as women, 43% identify as men and 1% identify as ‘other’. Our interview participants (five men and five women) were born in Australia, Canada, England, Iraq and China. We also include a critical analysis of Tinder’s User Interface (UI) and User Experience Design (UXD) to ensure that the technology is included in the assemblages of sexuality and research (Fox & Alldred, 2013, 2015). We focus mainly on heterosexual dating practices from the traveller perspective given the data we have collected thus far.]]