Marketing of Tourism Experiences

Noel Scott, Eric Laws, Philipp Boksberger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317987260
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Business

This book provides a review of the current theory and practice of experiential tourism and how it is marketed. Many societies today are characterised by widespread individual wealth of an order previously confined to the elite with the consequence that ownership of 'ordinary' physical goods is no longer a distinguishing factor. Instead people are now seeking the 'extraordinary' with examples being bodies enhanced through surgery, personal fitness trainers, and, in the case of leisure and tourism, seeking unique and unusual places to visit and activities to undertake. This trend manifests in the increasing consumption of services and the addition of experiential elements to physical goods by businesses aware of societal changes. The trend is enhanced by rapidly changing technology and economic production methods providing new sectors of the world's population with access to the consumption experiences that are repeatedly featured in the media. This is the experience economy, characterised by a search by consumers for fantasies, feelings, and fun.

This book was based on a special issue of Journal of Hospitality Marketing & Mangement.

Conceptualizing Experience: A Tourist Based Approach

SERENA VOLO

School of Economics and Management, Free University of Bozen, Bozen-Bozano, Italy

Despite considerable research on the topic of ‘tourist experience’, its contribution to tourism theory and its exploitation for the purpose of creating practical benefits for marketing practices, remain unclear. The present study reviews the existing literature and then presents a novel approach to interpreting experience in tourism by: (a) integrating the space and time dimensions into the ‘tourist experience’ concept, thereby shedding light on its nature and significance; and (b) examining tourists' spontaneous annotations on their travel experiences. Marketing implication and suggestions are provided for the benefit of tourism practitioners.

INTRODUCTION

Academics, practitioners and enterprises have paid increasing attention to consumers’ experience and its constituents over the past few decades. Pine and Gilmore (1999) successfully argued the emerging of an “experience economy” in which: (a) companies personally engage consumers through staged events; (b) experiences become offerings in the marketplace; and (c) consumers’ hearts are captured by the memorability of the experience. Given the experiential nature of tourism, the topic is receiving growing attention in literature, and since the sixties the tourist experience has been extensively investigated. Quan and Wang (2004) recognized two broad academic perspectives in the studies of tourism experience: (1) a social science approach (e.g.: Cohen, 1979; Lee & Crompton, 1992; MacCannell, 1973, 1976; Urry, 1990; Van, 1980) with a focus on the “peak touristic experience”– usually derived from attractions and being the motivator to tourism– as contrasted with the daily life experience, and (2) a marketing/management approach (e.g.: Moutinho, 1987; Swarbrooke & Horner, 1999) based on the centrality of the tourist, with emphasis on the consumer-centric experience and therefore, integrating the “supporting consumer experiences”– derived from the activities facilitating the peak experience, such as transportation, accommodation, food consumption and other additional services.

Experiences with different forms of tourism and of different typologies of tourists have also been extensively studied, e.g., holidaymakers (Wickens, 2002), urban tourists (Page, 2002), sport tourists (Bouchet, Lebrun & Auvergne, 2004), backpackers (Uriely, Yonay, & Simchai, 2002; Noy, 2004), food experience seekers (Quan & Wang, 2004), cultural tourists (Prentice, 2001), and heritage tourists (Beeho & Prentice, 1997). While each of these studies focus on a particular type of tourist's experience, together they offer theoretical and empirical analysis of the issue and provide insights for inte-grative approaches to the concept of ‘tourist experience.’ A comprehensive theoretical study is provided by Uriely's tourist experience conceptual development analysis (2005). In his work, Uriely, while depicting the mild passage from a modernist approach to tourist experience to a post-modernist one, identifies four major developments that have accompanied the process: (a) a shift from the sharp differentiation of everyday life and tourism experiences (e.g.: Cohen, 1972, 1979; MacCannell, 1973) towards a re-conjunction between leisure and work/everyday life activities (e.g.: Lash & Urry, 1994; Munt, 1994; Pizam, Uriely, & Reichel, 2000; Ryan, 2002a); (b) a move from an homogeneous portrayal of tourists' motivations to “multi-type individ-ual(s)” (Uriely, 2005) who search “micro-types” of tourism activities (Wickens, 2002); (c) a passage from objects to subjects centrality in shaping the experience (e.g.: Uriely et al., 2002; Wickens, 2002); and (d) a change from conflicting assertions to “complementary interpretation” (Uriely, 2005).

Thus, established approaches favor either: (a) a social science approach – including the investigation of motivations, activities, interests, meanings and attitudes, the search for authenticity and the focus on subjective experiences (Quan & Wang, 2004; Uriely, 2005) – or (b) a consumer behavior approach that includes the exploration of different typology of tourism activities by looking at the satisfaction or quality experienced by tourists, the importance of human interactions, the effect of familiarity, prior knowledge and past experience, and the role of external stimuli (Baum, 2002; Go, 2005; Gursoy & McCleary, 2004; Milman & Pizam, 1995; Tasci & Knutson, 2004). Despite the variety of studies, still many questions remain open: How do tourists conceive the experience? Do they have a mental framework or are the researchers trying to impose one on them? How can we influence tourists' experiences? The purpose of this study is to address such questions by: (a) investigating tourist experience definition and components through the information derived by the social science and marketing/management approaches; and (b) examining the meaning of tourist experience from the tourists' point of view.

The remainder of the article consists of four parts. In the first part previous studies concerning tourist experience are reviewed with attention to definition and nature of the experience and their marketing usefulness. In the second part, a conceptual framework that centers on the consumers’ point of view and which integrates the space and time dimensions is proposed. An analysis of tourists' spontaneous annotations that supports the theoretical framework is presented from which a definition of tourist experience is crafted. In the third part marketing suggestions are offered to tourism destinations and enterprises to understand the conditions necessary to revitalize their offerings and to satisfy the increasingly sophisticated experience seekers. The nature of the objects and subjects that constitute the tourist experience are integrated with the tasks of planning, managing and marketing the tourism experience. Lastly, the implications and limitations of the proposed approach are discussed and directions for future research given.

LITERATURE REVIEW

Definitions

The Oxford English Dictionary (1989) defines¹ experience as:

(1) The actual observation of facts or events, considered as a source of knowledge. (2) The fact of being consciously the subject of a state or condition, or of being consciously affected by an event. (3) What has been experienced; the events that have taken place within the knowledge of an individual, a community, mankind at large, either during a particular period or generally. (4) The fact of being consciously the subject of a state or condition, or of being consciously affected by an event. Also an instance of this; a state or condition viewed subjectively; an event by which one is affected.

Further, experience(s) has/have been defined as: (a) “a steady flow of fantasies, feelings, and fun” (Holbrook & Hirschman, 1982, p. 132); (b) “the act of living through an observation of events and also refers to training and the subsequent knowledge and skill acquired” (Hoch, 2002, p. 448); (c) the “result of encountering, undergoing, or living through situations” and “triggered stimulations to the senses, the heart, and the mind” (Schmitt, 1999, p. 25); (d) “the summation of a consumer's past product related consumption activities” (Alba & Hutchinson, 1987, as cited by Dodd, Laverie, Wilcox, & Duhan, 2005, p. 6); (e) [affective experience] “the result of a process of assimilating the world into a structure of cognitive maps or schemas”² (Eckblad, 1980, 1981a, 1981b, as quoted by Vittersø, Vorkinn, Vistad, & Vaagland, 2000). An experience is created, according to Pine & Gilmore, when “a company intentionally uses services as the stage and goods as props, to engage individual customers in a way that creates a memorable event” (Pine & Gilmore, 1999, p. 11). Moreover, it has been suggested that customers’ experience is the essential basis of the value proposition between service providers and consumers, and that the customers’ experience varies along an active to passive continuum and the affect varies from absorption to immersion (Pine & Gilmore, 1999). The tourist experience has been defined as: (a) “the culmination of a given experience” formed by tourists “when they are visiting and spending time in a given tourists location” (Graefe & Vaske, 1987, as cited by Page, Brunt, Busby, & Connell, 2001, p. 412); (b) “a complex combination of factors that shape the tourist's feeling and attitude towards his or her visit” (Page et al., 2001, p. 412–413); (c) “what the tourist is seeking” (Volo, 2005, p. 205); (d) “an example of hedonic consumption” (Go, 2005, p. 81). Finally, however, this study agrees with Chhetri, Arrowsmith, and Jackson (2004) in concluding that “there is no single theory that defines the meaning and extent of tourist experiences, although a number of authors have made attempts to formulate models by generalizing and aggregating information” (Chhetri et al., 2004, p. 34).

Complexity/Nature

The complexity of the tourist experience is highlighted from the findings and conclusions of many studies and involves difficulties in: defining it, identifying and measuring the components, and defining how it changes according to the characteristics of the individual tourists. Cohen, in his phe-nomenological approach, saw tourist experiences as opportunities for differentiation from everyday life (Cohen, 1972, 1979) and he identified “different modes of the tourists experiences” (Cohen, 1979, p. 180). Quan and Wang (2004) suggested that tourists' experiences must be seen as an organic whole in which peak (art, culture and heritage) and supporting experiences (accommodations, transportations, shopping, entertainment and food establishments) complement each other. However, the dynamism of the market can mutate the character of some tourism activities and open a whole new set of experiences (e.g., space travel, virtual reality). Lash and Urry (1994) indeed questioned the work-everyday life dichotomy introduced by Cohen and extended the status of tourist to many different situations whether consumers were enjoying attractions at the destinations or in a virtual reality setting. Cole and Scott (2004) proposed four stages of the tourists' experience, namely, “dimensions of performance quality, dimension of experience quality, overall satisfaction, and revisit intentions” (Cole & Scott, 2004, p. 79). For Graefe and Vaske the key characteristics are emotional involvement of the tourist, significant interaction between tourists and tourism system and active participation in the experience (Graefe & Vaske, 1987, as cited by Volo, 2005). Hetherington, Daniel and Brown (1993) “considered experiences in natural landscapes as contextual and multi-sensory.” They noted, for example, that “sound and motion are important determinants of visitor experiences, particularly for riverscapes” (Hetherington et al., 1993, as cited by Chhetri et al. 2004, p. 33). According to Volo (2004), “tourism experience can be characterized by the following four dimensions: (a) Accessibility dimension – how accessible is the tourism experience to one who may seek it? (b) Affective transformation dimension – what degree of affective transformation is experienced? (c) Convenience – what level of effort is required to access the experience? (d) Value – what is the benefit received per unit of cost?” (p. 373). Finally, the variability of the experience is another aspect to be considered, and while it is clear that “different people may engage in different experiences” (Uriely, 2005, p. 205–206), it can be even more surprising that the same tourist activity can create different experiences in people within the same market segment (e.g., the backpackers of Uriely et al., 2002; the holidaymakers of Wickens, 2002). One more degree of complexity comes from the fact that once in the marketplace, experiences follow the rules of the market. There are supply and demand rules for them as well as there are for goods and services (Pine & Gilmore, 1999).

Measurement

Tourists' experiences have been traditionally studied by: (a) structured surveys; (b) travel diaries; (c) structured or unstructured interviews; (d) observant participation (e) spontaneous travel narrative on periodicals (e.g., Takinami, 1998); (f) memory-work (e.g., Small, 1999). Recently, alternative unobtrusive methods have been used in the field of environmental sciences, varying from diaries to videos, sensory devices and use of GPS systems (e.g., Hull & Stewart, 1995; Chhetri & Arrowsmith, 2002; Arnberger & Brandenburg, 2002; Janowsky & Becker, 2002; Rauhala, Erkkonen, & Iisalo, 2002). Such methods, although very expensive in some cases, appear to be promising in the search for emotions, moods and feelings of visitors. The topic of measurement is of high interest, and a full examination of the measurement instruments and models used in previous research is warranted. Although such an examination goes beyond the scope of the present investigation, certain questions arise: How can we measure something that we have not clearly defined? Does our theoretical definition match the tourists' definition of experience? How do we define a good versus a bad experience? Some of the marketing focused research may help us to clarify such issues.

Evaluating the effect of various factors on tourists' satisfaction, understanding the how past experience influence future consumption, assessing the quality of the experience and understanding how to stage experiences for the benefit of both tourists and industry have been the most studied topics in tourism marketing literature. The most intriguing issue has been to measure the tourist experience characteristics and meanings and its relationship to motivations, needs, attractions, tourist typologies, past and future experiences, familiarity, authenticity, knowledge, learning, memory, a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction The Marketing of Hospitality and Leisure Experiences
• 1 Conceptualizing Experience: A Tourist Based Approach
• 2 Urban Tourism Precincts and the Experience of Place
• 3 Reading the Landscape: The Development of a Typology of Literary Trails that Incorporate an Experiential Design Perspective
• 4 The Consumption of Museum Service Experiences: Benefits and Value of Museum Experiences
• 5 Retail and Service Encounters: The Inter-Cultural Tourist Experience
• 6 Student Travel Experiences: Memories and Dreams
• 7 The Staging of Experiences in Wine Tourism
• 8 Marketing the Leisure Experience to Baby Boomers and Older Tourists
• 9 Effect of Experience on Cognition, Affect and Satisfaction: The Case of Japanese Visitors to Macau
• 10 Quality Tourism Experiences: Reviews, Reflections, Research Agendas
• 11 Agenda for Co-Creation Tourism Experience Research
• 12 Cultural Experience Tourist Motives Dimensionality: A Cross-Cultural Study
• Index