Navigating travel paradoxes: Gen Z coping responses and implications for destination management

Paradoxes involve contradictory yet interdependent poles that persist rather than disappearing when one side is chosen. Tourism routinely exposes travelers to such tensions, but traveler-level paradoxes and the responses used to navigate them remain underexamined. Using the early tourism-recovery period of 2022 as the empirical context, this study examines paradoxical tensions perceived by young adult Gen Z student travelers and how they respond to them. A two-stage qualitative design was employed. Study A recruited 98 Norwegian Gen Z student travelers, of whom 95 provided useable responses; Study B recruited 48 Gen Z student travelers from the United Kingdom and the United States, of whom 46 provided useable responses. Online open-ended essays were analyzed using thematic analysis, with constant comparison used as an iterative coding technique. Four persistent traveler-perceived tensions emerged: personal travel fulfillment versus environmental responsibility, community economic benefit versus community livability, business recovery versus service-capacity strain, and travel maximization versus travel restraint. Responses clustered into four types: integrative or balancing, prioritization, avoidance or resignation, and externalization or delegation. These responses did not permanently resolve the paradoxes; instead, they temporarily stabilized the tension, privileged one pole, reproduced it, or displaced responsibility. The study therefore positions the 2022 recovery period as an external intensifying condition that made enduring tensions especially visible and connects traveler paradox management to destination governance and shared responsibility.