Exploring the Travel Behavior and Experiences of Norwegian Surfers: Cold-Versus Warm-Water Surfing
Bibliographic record
Abstract
More affordable travel opportunities have facilitated a swift rise in surf tourism, which is a growing multibillion dollar global business niche within the broader sport tourism industry. It is argued that a growing number of surfers who are searching for the perfect wave without the crowds found in well-established surfing destinations are shifting to cold-water surfing. Previous research on surf tourism has largely focused on warm- and temperate-water surfing and related travel. However, an exploration of and an attempt to comprehend cold-water surf tourism and how it compares to similar activities in warm water has been overlooked. This study focuses on understanding the travel behavior and related experiences of Norwegian surf tourists domestically and internationally, to cold- and warm-water destinations. Data were collected using a phenomenological approach and semistructured in-depth interviews with 18 experienced Norwegian surfers. Results show that these surfers are highly mobile, visiting warm-water surf destinations such as Morocco, Bali, Australia, and Hawaii and also cold-water surf destinations such as Norway, Iceland, Scotland, and Canada. They travel to surf at least once a year, staying between 10 days and 3 months, preferably in cheap accommodation. The longer the travel distance, the longer the stay. Their experiences of "localism," where local surfers behave aggressively toward visiting surfers, were more common in crowded warm-water destinations. In addition to the enjoyment of surfing, these Norwegian surf tourists valued opportunities to create new social relationships, experience new and different cultures, and expand their "world-view" via their surf travel. They appreciated unique natural environments and experienced a deep connection to nature. This research presents the first empirical data on the travel behavior and related experiences of surf tourists from a nontraditional surfing nation in Scandinavia.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".