Co - Creation in Tourist Experiences

Nina K Prebensen, Joseph S Chen, Muzaffer S Uysal, Nina K Prebensen, Joseph S Chen, Muzaffer S Uysal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317293439
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Industrie de l'hôtellerie, du voyage et du tourisme

The tourist experience is multi-faceted and dynamic, as tourists engage with its formation and creation. The tourists then become vital in creating value for themselves together with the service provider. Experience value cannot be pre-produced, but is co-created between host and guest(s) in the servicescape. The tourist managers can therefore only plan for and facilitate for value co-creation to take place.

This book responds to the need for a critical review of how firms can facilitate and dramatize for enhanced experience value for tourists. As the roles of participants and providers are changing rapidly, new knowledge in terms of how value creation and value co-creation can transpire needs to be generated. The aim of this book is therefore to accentuate the role and importance of the core elements in value creation processes, namely, the customer(s), the setting in which co-creation would take place, and the provider.

Bringing together scholars from diverse areas to address the nature of how the actors co-create values through interaction in different experience settings, the book also serves as a guide to the best practice of co-creation of tourist experiences. It will therefore appeal practically as well as theoretically to scholars and students of tourism, marketing, leisure, hospitality, and services management.

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1 Tourist experience creation

An overview

Nina K. Prebensen, Joseph S. Chen and Muzaffer S. Uysal

Introduction

An experience is illustrated as a steady flow of thoughts and feelings that take place during moments of consciousness regarding experience dimensions (Carlson, 1997; Csikszentmihalyi, 1990). Tourist experiences are believed to be multi-faceted, dynamic and evocative through interactive processes in which the tourist passively or actively engages. In other words, the tourist has to be present and partake in the formation and creation of these experiences. A refreshing question, in this regard, is how tourists participate in such processes. Answers to the question might help in providing theories concerning the creation and co-creation of tourist experiences and support tourism managers in facilitating creation of value for all actors involved.

The extant tourism literature (e.g. Prebensen & Foss, 2011; Uriely, 2005; Walls, Okumus, Wang, & Kwun, 2011) has urged in-depth examination to disentangle the complicity of experience formation, as such experiences come to life through interactions with both the physical environment and humans. Consequently, several frameworks are developed to assist managers and researchers in understanding how and why different factors play a role in experiential service. The present book follows the spirit offered through these works to grasp interaction processes providing experience value for the actors involved. The interaction processes are examined from different dimensions—that is, the formation, creation and co-creation of experiences providing various forms of value for the tourist.

The dynamic process of tourist experience formation has been recently brought to prominence through the work of Chen, Prebensen and Uysal (2016). They suggest a conceptual framework presenting the drivers affecting and moderating the creation of tourist experiences during the process of travel engagement: the Tourist Experience Driver Model (TEDM). This model deals with three trip stages (before, during, and after), capturing the different phases of the travel experience, and highlights different drivers modifying and shaping the tourist encounter as the tourist travels through time and space encapsulating various experience settings influenced by various drivers during the travelling process. Smith’s (2003) holistic view of the tourism product included five elements: the physical plant, service, hospitality, freedom of choice, and involvement. Service providers need to acknowledge the alteration of perceptions, motivations, involvement, and knowledge amongst tourists going through the experience process. For tourism businesses catering to tourist demands at various stages of the trip, it is vital to focus on the interactions between tourists and service settings.

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Tourism enterprises are service-centered entities, which stage and cater for diverse participant experiences. Staged experiences are expected to entice demand, increase market share and retain loyalty, and are rendered by service staff in specific experience settings that may include natural, cultural and built environments. The firm or the organization can, however, only create the environment and the circumstances in which consumers are able to have an experience (Mossberg, 2007). The firm needs to know what the tourists prefer in terms of quality levels of physical environment, service and interactions, for value co-creation to happen. Research needs to explore and figure out: (1) What is a valuable tourist experience? (2) What do we mean by interaction processes? (3) Who and what are/should be involved in such processes? (4) How should the firm respond to the customer demands in various trip phases? (5) How can the firm motivate the tourist to co-create experience value? (6) To what extent should the firm dramatize a tourist experience? (7) What elements of a tourist journey can influence tourist emotion and wellness? These questions are discussed in the present chapter to further explain what actually affects the perceived experiences amongst tourists.

A tourist experience is a blend of many dimensions that come together (Shaw & Ivens, 2002), in which each dimension may affect the tourist perception of the process and outcome of the experience differently. On that matter, Mossberg (2007) discussed dimensions within the individual that may involve the consumer emotionally, physically, intellectually, and spiritually. Involvement is further shown to influence value perception in tourist experiences positively (Prebensen, Chen, Woo, & Uysal, 2014). Experience dimensions may include physical surroundings (e.g. Berman & Evens, 1995; Bitner, 1992; Wakefield & Blodgett, 1996) and social environments, including interaction with employees and other customers (e.g. Arnould & Price, 1993; Silkapit & Fisk, 1985; Walls et al., 2011). Interactions with service personnel and other participants at destinations, along with the newly acquired perceptions of the setting, may evoke new tourist experiences. It is advantageous that tourism firms and destinations can carefully facilitate enhanced tourist experiences by motivating, involving, and educating the tourists to partake in value creation and co-creation processes.

Experiential consumption

There has been a great deal of discussion on the differences between manufacturing and service firms (e.g. Brush & Artz, 1999). Consumer researchers have articulated that service organizations are unique due to their special characteristics such as inseparability, perishability, heterogeneity, and inconsistency (variability). Tourist experiences include these four characteristics; however, they largely differ from traditional services. Prebensen, Vittersø and Dahl (2013) demonstrated, for instance, that time and effort regarding planning and going on a vacation positively affects overall trip satisfaction. As traditional service literature claims that time and effort should be regarded as a cost for the consumers, the study by Prebensen, Woo and Uysal (2014) showed that consuming a vacation differs from a service consumption in terms of the way the customer perceives the accumulated costs and benefits. In a similar vein, other studies on the subject validate this difference (e.g. Carù & Cova, 2007; Chen et al., 2016). Prebensen, Woo, Chen, and Uysal (2014) and Prebensen, Woo, and Uysal (2014) claimed, for instance, that in an experience-based consumption, participants are inclined to be present and partake in the production process more than in traditional services which are bought due to customers’ unwillingness or lack of time or skill to do it themselves—for example, cleaning services, dentists, and lawyers. Another key difference between traditional services and tourism services is that for most traditional services the consumer is focused on the result of the service, whereas in tourism settings, services are being performed in the situation.

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Prebensen and Rosengren (2016) examined the relative importance of the dimensions of experience value in four different hedonic- and utilitarian-dominated tourism services. Their study reveals that both hedonic and utilitarian value dimensions are present for different types of experience, as is the case in transport, accommodation, dinner and museum experiences. However, the structures of value dimensions differ between hedonic- and utilitarian-dominant services. The authors proposed that a tourist experience continuum may entail (1) air travel, (2) a hotel, (3) a restaurant, and (4) a museum, and presents a mostly utilitarian experience at the one end and a hedonic experience at the other. However, since they all are relevant elements of the overall travel experience, they should all be included to fully acknowledge the experience value and the potential mixed effects of the overall satisfaction. Surprisingly, functional value and value for money were found to have the strongest influence on satisfaction for both types of service. Prebensen and Rosengren (2016) claimed that for the tourism business to enhance experience value and tourist satisfaction, the service firms should focus on delivering functional values during the trip encountering stage while utilizing emotional values to attract visitors. Their study suggests including all relevant services in the utilitarian-hedonic continuum.

In order to acknowledge the process of creating and co-creating experiences, researchers have examined the processes and the outcomes of experience consumption separately (Prebensen, Woo, Chen, & Uysal, 2014). In their work, Prebensen, Woo, Chen, and Uysal (2014) highlighted the differences between motivation, value perception and satisfaction, even though they acknowledge overlapping tendencies. Motivation triggers the buying behaviour process; however, this may change over time during the experience process. During the trip, the tourist perceives the experience value, and after the experienced encounter the tourist evaluates the level of satisfaction, affecting future intentions. Figure 1.1 represents the phases of a trip experience with salient aspects as process and outcome variables, such as motivation, perceived value, satisfaction, and loyalty.

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Figure 1.1 Trip experience phases with overlapping tendencies

In experiential consumption hedonic and eudaimonic needs and emotions dominate the perceived experience value which are vital in managing long-term customer relationships (Pride & Ferrell, 2000). Definitions of value vary according to the context, target and goals (e.g. Babin, Darden, & Griffin, 1994; Dodds, Monroe, & Grewal, 1991; Holbrook, 2005; Holbrook & Corfman, 1985) and may manifest through different stages of trip. Thus, the context, target and goal are of vast importance to recognize and acknowledge tourist participation in creating meaningful experiences.

Facilitating tourist experience co-creation

Tourism research has embraced theory from the service field which defines service as “a deed, a performance, and an effort” (Rathmell, 1966, p. 33). By doing so, tourism has more or less focused on the service provider as someone who produces valuable offers for the tourists to buy, to use and enjoy. This traditional view of the firm as the entity that produces value and the consumer as the entity that consumes value is discoursed strongly in contemporary perspectives on production and consumption processes (e.g. Prahalad & Ramaswamy, 2004; Vargo & Lusch, 2004). This logic claims that co-creation is about “shared creation of value by the company and the consumer” (Prahalad & Ramaswamy, 2004, p. 8), although in tourism literature the idea of the tourist being part of co-creation of experience is not new (e.g. Chon, 1989; Larsen, 2007; Mannell & Iso-Ahola, 1987; Uriely, 2005).

The service-dominant logic of marketing (Grönroos, 2006; Lusch & Vargo, 2006; Vargo & Lusch, 2004, 2006, 2008) recognizes the tourist role in creating experience value. This logic includes the idea that in the process of co-creating value, the tourists—in addition to firms and organizations—act as resource integrators (Arnould, Price, & Malshe, 2006; Vargo & Lusch, 2006), and that value is centered in the experiences of consumers (Prahalad & Ramaswamy, 2004). Hence, the foundational idea in the S-D logic is that the service encounter is an exchange process of value between the customer and the service provider. This perspective holds that the consumers and their skills and knowledge, depicted as operant resources, are able to contribute to value creation by integrating physical, social and cultural resources (Arnould et al., 2006).

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The tourist experience value is not all about the tourist being present at the destination and mentally or physically partaking of and enjoying various experiences while staying there for an extended period of time (Prebensen, Kim, & Uysal, 2016; Sandström, Edvardsson, Kristensson, & Magnusson, 2008). Grönroos and Voima (2013) deployed the term “value-in-use” to portray customers’ part in the co-creation process. Perceived experience value is defined by Prebensen, Woo, Chen, and Uysal (2014, p. 5) as “comprised of the benefits the tourist perceives from a journey and stay in a destination, including those assets or resources that the tourist, other tourists and the host bring to the process of co-creating experiences.” The definition supports the idea that the firm and the destination can only facilitate the value coming alive through the tourist participation of creating experience value, signifying an interaction and co-creation process between actors in a specific situation surrounded by either a staged atmosphere or organically evolved environment.

One of the key functions of the tourism enterprise and destinations is to serve as a facilitator in the process of creating value. Co-creating vacation experiences relies on interactions with people (e.g. travel partners, other visitors, and service staff) and in the servicescape where the sellers and buyers interact and the service process takes place (Booms & Bitner, 1980). This interaction may lead to increased (or decreased) value for the tourists (Prebensen & Foss, 2011). In addition to being involved in the tourist experience, other reasons for co-creation may appeal, such as appreciating perceived control over the service delivery process (Bateson, 1985) and the feeling of choosing (including novel experiences), which offers higher levels of customization (Schneider & Bowen, 2010). Is the service delivery process about value creation via interactions between host and guest? Does it include guest interactions—for example, tourists sharing information? Could co-creation be defined as a visitor enjoying various activities provided by firms and organizations at the destination? Beyond the human dimension, could a process of enjoying nature and exercising by hiking in the trails be delineated as part of the co-creation construct? If so, could all sorts of interactions that a tourist is involved in during a trip account for co-creating value? In that case, scholars ought to discuss if the co-creation construct loses its usefulness as a theoretical underpinning.

Interaction has traditionally been regarded as an essential characteristic of tourism because of simultaneous production and consumption, explicated as “prosumption” by Toffler (1980). Tourists not only interact with other people, they also interact with natural and manufactured elements (Prebensen & Foss, 2011). The way the firm facilitates and plans for these interactions to happen shall ensure tourists’ motivation, involvement, and learning to partake of the co-creation apparatus.

However, beyond what the firm can offer, some individuals are keen to produce their own experience, perhaps together with significant others—fa...