Abstract
This chapter explores the evolving demand for energy-intensive long distance leisure travel in retirement, a phenomenon which is widely predicted to be on the increase due to demographic change, rising retirement incomes and the retirement of the baby boomer generation, often labelled as the first consumer generation. We undertook serial interviews with three cohorts of people in London and Birmingham, UK, who were respectively approaching retirement, recently retired and longer retired. Drawing on interview material we discuss the different ways in which the time of retirement is imagined, experienced and consumed, and argue that understanding these different and sometimes competing temporal aspects of later life leads to a more nuanced understanding of the dynamics of demand for retirement leisure travel and its potential trajectories.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council [grant number EP/K011723/1] as part of the RCUK Energy Programme and by EDF as part of the R&D ECLEER Programme.
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Day, R., Hitchings, R., Fox, E., Venn, S., Hibbert, J.F. (2018). Leisure Travel and the Time of Later Life. In: Hui, A., Day, R., Walker, G. (eds) Demanding Energy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61991-0_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61991-0_9
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