Abstract: This paper attempts to explore why adult offspring initiate progeny-parent family travel, how two generations interact and deal with intergenerational conflicts during travel and how they evaluate their accompanying experiences from perspective of filial piety, based on in-depth interviews with both parents and their adult offspring. It is found that “repay” or “compensation” of filial piety is most important driving force to family travel with parents, and in many cases adult child exhibits “overspending” by showing filial obedience. On the other hand, parents occasionally utilize filial piety as culture resources to fulfill their personal goals, and to evaluate their experiences and interactions with adult children. Finally, we offered an exploratory explanation to why filial generation has a relative low evaluation while parent generation has a higher evaluation of family trip. Further, we suggest that future study in this particular area should attach much more importance to “filial piety tool boxes” paradigm which is in parallel with paradigm of “concept (values) affecting behavior”.

Key words: family travel, filial piety, reciprocal filial piety, intergenerational interactions, in-depth interview