Contemporary Tourist Experience

Concepts and Consequences

Richard Sharpley, Philip Stone

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138081482
• eBook ISBN: 9781317605492
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

This significant and timely volume aims to provide a focused analysis into tourist experiences that reflect their ever-increasing diversity and complexity, and their significance and meaning to tourists themselves. Written by leading international scholars, it offers new insight into emergent behaviours, motivations and sought meanings on the part of tourists based on five contemporary themes determined by current research activity in tourism experience:conceptualization of tourist experience; dark tourism experiences; the relationship between motivation and the contemporary tourist experience; the manner in which tourist experience can be influenced and enhanced by place; and how managers and suppliers can make a significant contribution to the tourist experience.

The book critically explores these experiences from multidisciplinary perspectives and includes case studies from wide range of geographical regions. By analyzing these contemporary tourist experiences, the book will provide further understanding of the consumption of tourism.

PART I

Conceptualising tourist experiences

To an extent, this section requires no introduction. In other words, not only does the tourist experience remain ‘a complicated psychological process’ (Quinlan Cutler and Carmichael 2010: 3) that is a function of a variety personal needs, perceptions and influences, but it is also dynamic inasmuch as it undoubtedly reflects or responds to transformations in the ‘external’ social worlds of tourism and tourists. Consequently, it is widely recognised that extant knowledge of the tourist experience is incomplete, that despite increasing academic attention paid to the subject (see Morgan et al. 2010) there is a continuing need to enhance our understanding of the phenomenon so that tourists’ needs and expectations may be better met. Fundamental to this, of course, is the development of a rigorous conceptual framework within which research into the tourist experience may be located.

Within the contemporary literature, there is consensus that the tourist experience is no longer something that is ‘supplied’ by the tourism sector; rather, tourists ‘co-create’ their experiences in ways that reflect evolving meanings and modes of consumption with the so-called ‘experience economy’ (Pine and Gilmore 1999). It is from this perspective that the three chapters in this section conceptualise the tourist experience. In Chapter 1, the evolving relationship between tourists and those providing tourism services is considered by Ana Goytia Prat and Álvaro de la Rica Aspiunza. Identifying four distinctive periods, they argue that in the first decade of the twenty-first century we have entered a ‘second generation experience economy’ in which the tourism product/service value chain has been superseded by a tourist experience value chain.

In Chapter 2, Graham Henning sets out to challenge the very notion of the tourism experience, of tourists proactively seeking novel and meaningful experiences. Recognising that tourists’ normal, contemporary lives are defined by inauthenticity and habitual rules, it is logical to assume that tourism represents the search for the authentic, the novel and the ‘other’. However, introducing the philosophy of habit, he goes on to suggest that the consumption of tourism itself is habitual, if not an addiction. As a consequence, he concludes that tourism is perhaps an addiction to satisfaction and behaviour rather than the force for change and the place of deep experiences. Then, in Chapter 3, Darius Liutikas explores what he refers to as ‘valuistic journeys’. Such journeys represent a means by which travellers (or pilgrims, in both the relgious and secular sense) reveal their personal values as well as creating personal and social identity. Reporting on research among traditional (religious) and modern (secular) pilgrim tourists in Lithuania, he identifies both difference and similarities between these two groups, thus developing a framework for understanding the significance of the experience of valuistic journeys.

1 Personal experience tourism

A postmodern understanding

Ana Goytia Prat and Álvaro de la Rica Aspiunza

Introduction

This chapter reviews and analyses, from a temporal or procedural point of view, the role granted to the tourist experience by tourism supply managers. The historical analysis is organised into three broad periods in each of which the evolution of the meaning given to experience, the tourism market approach and value creation in tourism supply are examined. The first period, which extends up to the 1990s, is characterised by the relocation of tourists to the centre of the tourism system. For the purposes of this discussion, tourists are understood as clients to whom products and services must be offered and given by providing as much added value as possible. The second period, referred to here as the ‘design of emotional products for guests’, occurs during the last decade of the twentieth century and responds to the so-called first generation experience economy in which tourist experience products and services are offered, and the creation of added value is achieved by selling memorable experiences. Finally, the third period, entitled ‘co-creation of experiences and emotions’, covers the first decade of the twenty-first century, when the tourist no longer has a passive role. It raises a ‘second generation experience economy’ characterised by a tendency to provide the opportunity for co-creating and living meaningful tourist experiences. The market focus has shifted from ‘what I offer to you’ to ‘what you want to experience’, so that the tourist is no longer a consumer and becomes a colleague, a partner, a friend who should be taken into consideration when producing tourist experiences. As a consequence, the tourist experience product/service value chain is superseded by the tourist experience value chain.

Up until the second decade of the twenty-first century, commentators have argued in favour of enhancing the humanistic angle of the experience’s significance and of tourist experience management. Conversely, defining the experience as a holistic ‘persona-centred’ concept, in this chapter we focus attention upon the tourist experience’s capacity for facilitating tourists’ personal growth and self-development through immersion in the tourist experience. Understanding this capacity as the key issue in the tourist experience value-adding process, we pose the hypothesis of a new tourism business market-orientation led by an innovative tourist experience manager: the ‘personal experiencer’.

The humanistic understanding of tourist experience management under suspicion

Ritchie and Hudson (2009) identify six broad categories which appear to reflect a current of thought and research concerning the tourist experience.¹ Of these six currents, this chapter will focus on the relationship between the first and the fifth; that is, on the understanding of what a tourist experience is when managing experiences in the tourism industry.

The study of the tourist experience emerged during the 1970s when it was understood as a modern phenomenon resulting from the democratisation of travelling for leisure purposes. The analysis of the nature and meaning of the tourist experience from a modern viewpoint was dominated by two competing perspectives. On one hand, authors such as Barthes (1972), Boorstin (1964) and Turner and Ash (1975) argued within a social criticism framework, viewing tourism as a new kind of colonialism and as a symptom of modern decadence. On the other hand, an opposing approach was represented by MacCannell (1973) who conceptualised the tourist experience as a meaningful modern ritual which involves a quest for authenticity. Nevertheless, both currents shared a modernist form of analysis that viewed societies and social facts, such as tourism, as totalities. In this respect, both standpoints have been unable to capture the existing variety in the practice of tourist experiences, instead offering a portrayal of the ‘tourist’ as a general type.

This modern homogeneous understanding of the tourist experience was first challenged by Cohen (1979: 180) who, in his seminal work on the phenomenology of tourist experiences, proposed that ‘different kinds of people may desire different modes of tourist experiences’. Subsequently, from the early 1980s onwards, the tourist experience was increasingly understood as a post-modern phenomenon; that is, as a plural experience. Furthermore, the notion of a diverse and plural realm of postmodern tourism goes one step beyond Cohen’s (1979) proposition as regards the variety of tourist experiences. While Cohen proclaimed that different people perform different tourist activities, Feifer (1985) characterised the ‘post-tourist’ according to their enjoyment of moving across the different types of tourist experiences.

Thus, whereas earlier theories of modern tourism homogenise the tourist experience as a general type, the postmodern understanding of the tourist experience is characterised by a multiplicity of tourist motivations, values, emotions, behaviour, preferences, interests and opinions. As a result, it is the person and their plural and unrepeatable nature that endow the tourist experience with sense and meaning. The question, therefore, is: to what extent do tourism managers recognise and respect the above mentioned humanistic and persona-centred understanding of the tourist experience?

In addressing this issue, the purpose of this chapter is to propose a humanistic tourism market approach that respects the concept of experience from a humanistic point of view. This main aim is achieved through the following objectives: to analyse from an historical perspective the evolution of the meaning given to experience; to review from an historical perspective the tourism market approach; and to discuss the value given to the offer of experiences and the configuration of the tourist experience value chain over time. As a result, we provide a contemporary, updated understanding of the tourist experience concept and offer a managerial proposal built on a humanistic perspective. In so doing, this chapter aims to provide a basis for helping tourism managers to better understand the role of the person, the tourist, in an industry characterised by continuous change.

The evolution of the tourist experience concept

From the 1980s to the 1990s. The tourist at the centre of the tourism system

Definition of experience

Up to the late 1980s, the supply or offer of tourism did not yet consider the experience as an aspect to be offered; rather, the value of the offering was that which was provided by the tourism product or service. The concept of tourism service was defined in comparison to that of a product, in the sense of a physical, tangible product (Rufino 1995). However, the need arose to consider the product at four distinctive levels: the generic product, the expected product, the improved or enhanced product and the potential product (Levitt 1980; Kotler et al. 2004). Among all these, the potential product is of particular interest in the tourism industry as it is based on the idea that the offer or supply of tourism services requires interaction with the purchaser of the service in a number of ways. First of all, tourists, as consumers of tourism services, have to interact with the service supply system, which means that the environment as the physical surrounding is a critical element of the services provided; second, the customer participates in the offerings of most tourism services, so there is therefore an interaction between the tourist and the service offered; third, in tourism settings, the service offer frequently involves or requires interaction amongst customers themselves; and finally, tourism services, as with other services more generally, are characterised by co-production, or the involvement of the tourist in the production of services on offer.

However, although these different product levels, particularly the concept of potential product, would, in the future, become an integral element of the concept of experience (LaSalle and Britton 2003), this was not the case in the late 1980s. In short, at this time a service offer was defined only from the perspective of production and not from the point of view of the tourist or their own needs.

Tourism market approach

The importance given to interaction with the customer led to a change in thinking on the part of tourism organisations. More specifically, from a production or transactional orientation, there was a shift towards a relational orientation or philosophy. Indeed, as Sainz de Vicuña (2006) points out, an important aspect to note is the confrontation between these two mentalities (the transactional orientation and relational orientation) when approaching identical problems. The new thinking that emerged during the late 1980s and into the 1990s consisted of focusing efforts on searching for a mutually satisfactory relationship between tourism companies and tourists. Establishing, maintaining and improving relations with tourists represent a completely different philosophy from the traditional approach, emphasising as it does the crucial role of those who are already customers of an organisation as opposed to searching for new customers. Authors such as Sánchez et al. (2000), Robledo (1998), Buttle (1996), Peppers and Rogers (1995) and Bitner (1995) identify the various factors behind the emergence and development of this relationship-based approach. These factors are: the need to cultivate the loyalty of increasingly sophisticated and demanding tourists; the influence of technology on almost all tourism products and services; the intensification of competition; and, the conception of markets as networks.

The paradigm shift from a transactional approach, based on the product, to a relational approach, based on resources and skills, is considered in detail by Grönroos (1996). This transformation is illustrated by Barroso and Martín (1999) in the figures in the following sub-sections. From the transactional perspective, the market is considered in terms of more or less anonymous customers and the company’s offer basically consists of goods and services. Conversely, the relational perspective approaches the customers, be they tourists or tourism organisations, individually.

To summarise, the first period is characterised by tourists being relocated to the centre of the tourist system. The emerging importance of services as a feature in the value enhancement strategy for tourism products and of customer relationship management (CRM) are identified as key factors during this period, whilst business market orientation increasingly came to be based on relational marketing, such as considered in Berry’s (1983) seminal...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Introduction Experiencing tourism, experiencing happiness?
• Part I Conceptualising tourist experiences
• Part II Understanding dark tourism experiences
• Part III Motivation and the contemporary tourist experience
• Part IV Place and the tourist experience
• Part V Managing tourist experiences
• References
• Index