The term coolcation has rapidly entered tourism marketing, lifestyle journalism, industry communications, and policy discussions as a claimed response to rising temperatures and increasing heat extremes in traditional European summer destinations. While the term has gained growing attention in industry discourse and media coverage, it has received little academic attention and little is known about how its meaning is constructed and communicated by tourism stakeholders. This study adopts a social constructivist ontology and an interpretivist epistemology to examine how tourism stakeholders frame the coolcation term and concept. Drawing on framing theory (Entmann, 1993), the study explores processes of frame building through which particular understandings of coolcation are produced, reproduced, and communicated. Rather than treating coolcation as a fixed or objective phenomenon, the analysis investigates how stakeholders selectively emphasise certain aspects of reality while downplaying others, thereby shaping interpretations of climate-related tourism change. The study further recognises that frames are not neutral representations of reality but have the potential to influence perceptions and direct attention towards particular tourism futures (for basis Foucault, 2002; Vogler et al., 2026). Empirically, the research analyses stakeholders’ website text content engaging with the term. Through qualitative frame analysis, the study identifies four dominant frames in which coolcation is constructed: The four frames are closely connected and, read together, form one line of argument: coolcation is presented as a trend that is already happening (Frame 1), explained by heat and climate unpredictability in Southern Europe (Frame 2), directed towards cooler regions in the North and West that promise relief and wellbeing (Frame 3), and justified as a responsible and a sustainable travel choice (Frame 4).
Based on this analysis, the paper critically reflects how coolcation as a developing discourse (1) claims a travel trend before it is statistically proven, (2) shapes expectations of climate and weather comfort in Northern regions which however, same as Southern Europe, face weather extremes (Wilcke et al., 2020), (3) legitimates growth via a climate change adaptation behaviour while further contributing to the climate crisis (Font & Hindley, 2017), (4) reinforces the Northern European power system by promotion Southern destination disposability (Higgins-Desbiolles, 2022; Rastegar et al., 2023) and (5) neglects mobility inequalities (Sheller, 2018).
This study suggests that coolcation works primarily as a discursive phenomenon (rather than a behavioural one) and contributes to emerging scholarship on climate change and tourism by advancing understanding of how tourism stakeholders construct meaning around new climate-related tourism concepts and by demonstrating the usefulness of framing theory for analysing evolving tourism discourses.
