Beyond Fun and Excess

This essay provides a brief introduction to party tourism, that is travel (typically undertaken by people under 30) for the explicit purpose of indulgence in drinking, dancing, and other party behavior. Though the phenomenon (of which the US Spring Break is the most well-known example) has generated strong disapproval since its emergence in the 1950s, I argue that it is important for scholars to not reject the practice as simply vulgar, dangerous, and/or exploitative. Embracing it as the go-to solution to revitalizing or diversifying a city’s assets under the umbrella term of the night-time economy (NTE) is equally problematic. Staying away from both moral panic and festive-touristic enchantment, this essay thus strives to uncover the complexities of party tourism and presents it as an advantageous entry point to a variety of subjects, including the construction of masculinity, the evolution of urban space, the tourist gaze, and more generally, racial, economic and social inequalities.