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Drawing from two years of multi-sited fieldwork about international backpacking in Central America, I make important connections between the backpacking escape motive, the backpacker hostel, and tourism. I explain how backpackers experience the hostel as their “home base” and “home away from home” to escape into local cultures and natural environments that exist outside of it and an international community of travelers that convenes inside of it. I refer to theories on modern tourism, the backpacking escape motive, and the concept of community. I also theorize how the global spread of modern amenities and tourism shapes backpackers' escape experiences.

Writing in his seminal work Crime Control as Industry, Nils Christie (1993) outlines his vision of how western societies were facing increased unrest due to unequal wealth distribution and lack of access to properly paid work. After a sustained period of neo-liberalism and rationalisation throughout the western world, Christie's prediction of rising crime rates in relatively wealthy states has come to pass. However, the responses to this increase in crime have been varied from nation to nation. In Christie's case, the rise of the ‘crime control industry’ is a response that combines social control with a growth industry based on processing members of certain sections of society through a course of action that includes arrest, remand, trial and imprisonment at a time when the emphasis on rehabilitation appears to have diminished.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the perception of tourists in relation to corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices in the city of Porto as a tourism destination in three main domains as follows: community, environment and customer’s perception on the effect of the creation of corporate social responsibility image (CSRI) and if this produces a direct effect in brand love (BL). At the same time, it evaluates the effect of tourist engagement in the BL destination.

A sample of 958 complete answers that were collected through a questionnaire, which was administered to tourists in the city of Porto is used. The exploratory factor analysis, the confirmatory factor analysis and the structural equation modelling are appliedto analyze the data.

Empirical results indicate that the city of Porto should invest to increase the CSR activities to develop a positive CSRI in the tourist’s perceptions, thus reinforcing their emotions and engagement. The feelings of BL and brand engagement (BE) are sensations characterized by a strong character that can increase the competitiveness of a tourism destination with favourable and unique associations.

This is the first time that this evaluation has been carried out for the city of Porto, providing useful information to design the destination’s brand identity so as to differentiate it from other competing destinations.

This research aims to fulfil the aforesaid gaps related to the effect of the three dimensions of CSR in the consumer perceptions of CSRI applied to tourism destinations and use the BE and the consumer perception of CSRI to establish a positive relationship, as a BL, with a city destination.