The Role of Cultural Distance in Mediating the Host Gaze

The Contact Hypothesis suggests that contact between people of different cultural backgrounds may result in positive and negative outcomes. As people are more likely to develop social contact with their own national group, or those with a similar background, it was posited that Dutch hosts were more likely to develop positive social contact with German tourists than with East Asian tourists. Our in-depth interviews with Dutch tourism-related business participants suggested the opposite. Furthermore, it was found that stereotypes attributed to a culture travel with its people as tourists in different ways, depending on cultural distance. Cultural distance seems to mediate the host gaze in different ways, and new hypotheses have emerged calling for more research on tourism encounters in different geographical contexts.