Celebrity-spotting: A new dynamic in Italian tourism

Purpose: Celebrity-spotters actively pursue celebrities in order to take photographs of them. This often involves extensive travelling, sometimes to remote destinations. The purpose of this paper is to analyse this new type of tourism. Design/methodology/approach: In order to understand this new type of tourism, the authors used a textual analysis of Italian celebrity-spotting web sites and 31 in-depth interviews with celebrity-spotters. Findings: The main characteristics of the celebrity-spotters can be outlined: they practise a sort of "precision tourism", characterised by close attention to the news in order to know where to go, flexibility for changing locations at the last moment, and a natural predisposition for new technologies. Celebrity-spotting is not just an observational tourism, but rather a performing one; they must take photographs, gain access to the right places and ambush their targets. Practical implications: Knowing the characteristics of celebrity-spotters can help to better understand this new type of tourism, which has yet to be exploited by the tourism industry. Originality/value: The paper presents an in-depth analysis of a rather unknown and unexplored type of tourist. © Emerald Group Publishing Limited.