Microadventure: A wild self-production of the proximity tourist experience?[Microaventure : une autoproduction sauvage de l’expérience touristique de proximité ?]

Microadventure is a short and local adventure, popularized by the exploratory and author Alistair Humphreys in 2014. This term may cover already existing practices that are not necessarily designated as such by its followers. Microadventure is a form of the "staycation" phenomenon, a neologism mixing the terms "stay" and "vacation", which designates the fact of spending one's holidays on one's own territory. Microadventure has received increasing interest from consumers, the media and tourism stakeholders, but little attention from the scientific community. By catalyzing questions about several emerging tourism phenomena, it offers an opportunity for original analysis. Indeed, this could increase in the coming years with growing geopolitical, health, ecological and economic constraints. This research analyzes microadventure as a new form of tourist experience re-enchanting everyday life and the surrounding area, from the perspective of self-production of tourism experience and consumer agency. Data were collected from three groups of local mountain climbers at a famous climbing site in the French Northern Alps (Mont Aiguille), during a two-day trip including an overnight wilderness camping at the top of the moutain. Following an ethnomarketing approach, data emcompass on site interviews on motivations, expectations, inspirations and material equipment from technical technical gear, to food and artefacts, immersive observations, research logbook, pictures, and feedback from the respondents. Our results reveal three categories of microaventure practices: performance, collection and play, echoing an assisted, a facilitated and a wild form of self-produced tourist experience. The latter is characterized by an unbridled freedom of its followers that make it difficult to tame by tourist actors.