An increasing growth of older people has caused significant socioeconomic transformations for almost all sectors of society, including the tourism industry. In the last decades, older adults have become an important target group for the leisure tourism market on a global scale. It is estimated that older individuals, especially the representatives of the baby-boom generation, will be responsible for a relatively large share of all holiday spending, and that senior tourism will become the fastest and biggest potential driving force in the hospitality markets. Yet, senior tourism is still a marginal branch in aging and tourism studies. This article aims to address this gap by highlighting the complex nexus of recreational later-life mobility, active engagement and successful aging. It interrogates whether the senior tourism market liberates and empowers older adults, or further perpetuates age-related inequalities and reinforces consumerist pressures and the ideals of a good old age. To answer this question, it sheds light on the positive aspects of leisure travels in later life, such as an enhanced sense of well-being, happiness and psychological health. As a counterargument, the article shows how the senior leisure market, constructed around neoliberal Western notions of successful aging, further deepens discrimination among older adults.

This article is based on qualitative analysis of interviews and focus groups conducted with participants enrolled in the Senior Programme of the University of Lleida, the City Council of Lleida, and care homes, as well as professional workers in the field of gerontology and related areas. It presents the analysis of interviews focused on the participants’ life trajectories, ageing, creativity, self-perception, and quality of life. The study aimed to examine how creativity influences the maintenance and improvement of a sense of wellbeing in older adults, and to reflect on how the perception of old age and of oneself changes through creative activity and active engagement across the life span. The article is framed within a new concept in sociology and the social sciences—‘profiguration’, which is the key element in the promotion and strengthening of intergenerational interdependence, education, wellbeing, social participation, and active ageing.

Important demographic shifts and the so-called ‘longevity revolution’ have generated profound transformations in social interpretations of old age, an increased interest in age studies and new ideas on how to age well. The majority of current successful ageing models, however, represent rather a prevailing construct in Western societies. Physical and psychosocial well-being and the ability to adjust to the ideals of successful ageing are often seen as an integral part of a good quality in life. Those who do not or cannot follow these lines are often regarded as morally irresponsible and seem to be doomed to have a lonely, unhealthy and unhappy later life. This paper questions the current discourses of successful ageing in terms of healthy and happy living and calls for a reconsideration of more global, integrated and holistic understandings of the process of growing old.

This study describes and analyzes the role of a Senior Programme of the University of Lleida (Catalonia, Spain) aimed at fostering older people’s lifelong learning, active ageing, social participation, and intergenerational relationships. Based on qualitative Action Research and Participant Observation, this article examines the participation of senior students as stakeholders in this Programme and in two European projects, SIforAGE and TOY, developed between 2012 and 2017. The findings reveal the importance of these learning and research activities to promote intergenerational solidarity, the quality of life of older people, and the development and improvement of the Senior Programme itself.

New biomedicalized forms of longevity, anti-aging ideals, and the focus on successful aging have permeated the current sociocultural and political climate, and will affect the future of aging. This article examines changing attitudes towards sexual practices and the perception of sexuality in later years, as exemplified in Erica Jong’s middle and late life works and interviews. Instead of succumbing to anti-aging culture and biomedicalization of sex in old age, Jong reveals alternative ways of exploring sexual practices in older age, and challenges a pharmaceutical market that promotes the consumption of medication to enhance the idea of virility and ‘sexual fitness’ in older men. Jong’s work undoes the narrative of decline that portrays older individuals as sexually inactive and frail, and, at the same time, shows that the interest in sexual intercourse and the erect phallus gradually becomes less important as people grow older. This qualitative narrative analysis opens the discussion for reconsideration of late-life sexuality beyond biomedical understandings of late-life sex and old age. The study also reveals how a literary approach can provide alterative and more realistic perspectives towards sexual experiences in later stages of life that can have significant implications for healthcare policy and the future of aging.