A paradox about visiting friends and relatives (VFR) travel is that, although a marginalized category by tourism planners and academics until recently, it has always been, as a domain of behaviour, more central to human experience than leisure tourism. Relationships between relatives and friends have, at all places and times, been forged and sustained by reciprocal visits, a reality borne out by reflection, and one that has been documented widely in cultural texts. This paper explores what these texts tell us about the subjective meaning and significance of VFR travel that is not necessarily disclosed by the quantitative, problem‐centred approaches used in managerial research. The first part examines a sample of, mainly, literary texts from the past and present and identifies some of the diverse scenes and scenarios within them. The paper then moves from the texts to offer a theoretical framework for understanding the phenomenology of VFR travel, derived from the sociological insights of Georg Simmel into social gatherings and informal associations. This qualitative framework, it is proposed, augments the quantitative methodologies that currently dominate VFR research, as a way of exploring the existential features of VFR behaviour. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.