Visitor Experience Design

Noel Scott, Jun Gao, Jianyu Ma, Noel Scott, Jun Gao, Jianyu Ma

• Publisher: CAB International
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781786391896
• eBook ISBN: 9781786391919
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

Most discussion of visitor experiences uses a behavioural or managerial approach where the way the visitor thinks is ignored - it's a black box. Visitor Experience Design is the first book of its kind to examine best practice in creating and delivering exciting and memorable travel and visitation experiences from a cognitive psychological perspective - it opens the black box. The chapters draw on recent findings from cognitive psychology, cognitive science and neuroscience to provide a basis for a better understanding of the antecedents of a memorable experience, including: · The psychological process of the formation or creation of a visitor's experiences· Psychological aspects of tourism experiences such as attention, emotion, memory and mindfulness· Pre-stage experience: customer inputs such as knowledge, myths, values and memories from previous travel · On-site experience: co-creation processes · Post-stage experience: immediate and long term outcomes including happiness and well-being· Experience design cases Tourism, hospitality and event managers seek to provide WOW experiences to their visitors through better design and management.This book encourages the discussion of different facets of experience design such as emotions, attentions, sensations, learning, the process of co-creation and experiential stimuli design.It will be of interest to tourism researchers and postgraduate students studying tourism management, marketing and product design.

Part I Creating Memorable Experiences – Theories and Framework

1

Introduction: Creating Memorable Experiences

JIANYU MA,¹* JUN GAO¹ AND NOEL SCOTT²

¹Shanghai Normal University, Shanghai, China; ²Griffith University, Southport, Australia

1.1 Introduction

The aim of this book is to examine the best practice in creating and delivering exciting and memorable visitor experiences from a psychological perspective. Increasingly, visitor destinations, hotels, attraction operators and other service providers are seeking to improve visitors’ experiences through their better design and management (Ooi, 2005). By enhancing their experiences, providers are better able to please their target markets, increase loyalty intentions and improve word of mouth recommendations (Carbone, 1998). In a recent example of experience design, the aviation company KLM gave personally relevant gifts to its customers who were waiting for a flight connection, in order to improve their transit experiences (KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, 2010). This experiment was aimed at creating positive emotions such as surprise and happiness. The Canadian Tourism Commission has developed an online ‘toolkit’ to help tourism businesses deliver compelling experiences (Arsenault, 2004). These examples reflect the growing importance of the experience economy (Pine and Gilmore, 1999) and of designing better visitor experiences.

Academics in a number of experience related subfields, such as structured leisure experiences (Duerden et al., 2015) and design science (Kim and Fesenmaier, 2017), have sought to understand the nature and characteristics of memorable experiences. As later chapters of this volume will demonstrate, researchers from various disciplines such as sociology (Cohen, 1979) and anthropology (Abrahams, 1986) have examined visitor experiences, considering them as phenomena different from the routine experiences of daily life. Marketing and management researchers have explored the components of memorable experiences (Schmitt, 1999a), the needs they satisfy (Otto and Brent Ritchie, 1996; Kim et al., 2012), the stages in their formation (Aho, 2001) and how they influence future travel intentions (Ryan, 2000). However, these approaches are primarily descriptive and do not provide an explanation for how and why experiences are evaluated and appreciated. The conceptualization of, and theorizing about, experiences, methodological development and exploration of the design and delivery of visitor experiences require attention (Ritchie et al., 2011).

Difficulties in conceptualizing tourism experiences are in part due to the subjectivity of an individual’s response to a particular situation. Experiences arise out of a visitor’s individual interpretation of an external stimulus based on their personal, social and cultural background (Ooi, 2005). Indeed, a tourism experience is suggested as ‘fundamentally subjective … [and] shaped by three things — what occurred, the meaning that the service provider applies to what occurred, and the interpretation the consumer gives to what occurred, both during and after the experience’ (Ritchie et al., 2011, p. 433). In this book, recent findings from cognitive psychology provide a basis for a better understanding of the antecedents of a memorable experience. This in turn will help managers to determine the effectiveness of specific experiential stimuli, allowing them to achieve the required experiential outcomes.

1.2 Tourism Experiences

The research roots of consumption experience can be traced back to the 1950s, when Abbott (1955) notes that:

What people really desire are not products but satisfying experiences. Experiences are attained through activities. In order that activities may be carried out, physical objects or the services of human beings are usually needed … People want products because they want the experience-bringing services which they hope the products will render.

(pp. 39–40)

In defining ‘experience’, the word can be used as a noun or a verb and invokes attributes such as subjectivity, involvement, emotion and learning (Gao et al., 2010). When it is used as a noun, it is generally describing those emotional, spiritual, psychological or learning outcomes that result from a dynamic process of a person’s involvement in activities. When used as a verb, experience describes a transformation process that has happened in the past, embodies consumers’ participation and leads to the aforesaid outcomes (Table 1.1). In this volume, experience per se for consumers is considered distinct from goods or services. Due to its subjectivity, emotional states play a significant role in making an experience memorable (Zehrer, 2009). However, it should be noted that physical goods and a functional service are not completely unrelated to an experience (Knutson et al., 2006), but instead may be seen as the media used to involve the visitor in an experience; they must be regarded as a part, but only a part, of an experience. In other words, an experience has other components, apart from those of the goods or services, which can provide memorable sensations for consumers.

Table 1.1. Definitions of an experience (from Gao et al., 2010).

1.2.1 Tourism as experiences

Experience research in tourism began as early as the 1960s, when Clawson (1963) wrote about recreation experiences and Boorstin (1964) commented on authenticity with regard to tourist experiences (Jennings et al., 2009). In the 1970s, tourism was identified as providing an experience by a number of authors (MacCannell, 1976; Dann, 1977; Cohen, 1979). Pine and Gilmore (1999) provided an economic analysis of the growth of US leisure and tourism attractions, such as theme parks, concerts, cinemas and sports events, and considered that these types of businesses all offered valued experiences which were unique, memorable and engaged the individual in a personal way. They proposed experience design principles that are particularly relevant to the tourism industry (Hayes and MacLeod, 2007) which have, arguably, been long practised in the visitor attractions sector. An example is the Disney Corporation providing successful themed experiences since the 1950s (Bryman, 2003). Clearly the concept of the experience economy is closely related to tourism both in its origins and its implications (Morgan et al., 2009).

Tourism is a quintessential experience economy offering. The experience economy concept provides dimensions for interpreting tourist experience (Richards, 2001). On the one hand, tourism is mainly concerned with the tourist experience since it is involved with visiting, seeing, learning, enjoying and living in a different mode of life (Stamboulis and Skayannis, 2003). On the other hand, a visitor’s experience can also impact on their learning and subsequent behaviour (Ballantyne et al., 2011). Therefore, tourism may be considered as a type of social–psychological experience (Dunn Ross and Iso-Ahola, 1991), and ‘primarily sells a “staged” experience … [it's] central productive activity [is] the creation of the touristic experience’ (Sternberg, 1997, pp. 952, 954). In this sense, tourism is all about experiences (Arsenault, 2004), and everything that tourists go through can be considered experience – behavioural or perceptual, cognitive or emotional, expressed or implied. Clearly, the core of tourism, the tourist experience, is practically important as well as having been maintained as an academic theme over the past five decades.

1.2.2 What is a tourist experience?

This book takes a psychological view of tourist experiences. In Chapter 2, Larsen, Doran and Wolff discuss the ontology, epistemology and methodology appropriate for the study of memorable experiences from a psychological perspective. In Chapter 3, Scott and Le review the theoretical literature of the tourism experience and highlight the relevance of various psychological theories and concepts in understanding tourist experiences. These authors consider that psychological theory is important as a starting point in designing research studies into the tourist experience, and that methodological stringency and reflections based on standard accepted methods of science are vital for developing a cumulative knowledge base. Further, they infer that it is in this manner that tourism may aspire to legitimate disciplinary status and create impact. A number of the other chapters, although not all, ascribe to this philosophical orientation.

Within this psychological perspective of experience, visitors travel to a tourism setting, whether it be an attraction, hotel, destination or other type. There they perceive and attend to various stimuli within this setting or 'experiencescape' (O’Dell and Billing, 2005). Similar to the concept of servicescape, an experiences-cape is a combination of technical, functional and experiential attributes staged in a process involving supplier-created meaning, service and goods (Gao et al., 2010). Attention is a collection of neural and cognitive processes which influence what will be perceived, encoded and recalled in our minds (Campos et al., 2016). Attentive behaviour is triggered through bottom-up exogenous stimuli in the environment; or top-down, according to a visitor’s motivations, interests and values. The perceptions and sensory data attended to are then processed with reference to the visitor’s personal mental schema. Such schema relate the visitor’s cultural background, perceived symbols; and recalled stories, attitudes and attributes, to provide contextual meaning to their conscious experience. Importantly, the motivation and goals of the visitor influence how the stimuli are perceived, attended to and appraised. Chapter 6 discusses the effect of attention further. It is important to emphasize here that experiences do not create a particular meaning that an individual receives; rather, individual experiences involve appraisal and interpretation (Fournier, 1991).

Implicit in the individual nature of an experience is that some process of cognition and appraisal stands between perception of sensory stimuli and consequent psychological outcomes or reactions such as elicitation of emotion, feelings, evaluations of value or satisfaction, or learning. The importance of mental appraisal of stimuli can be found in the definition of an emotion, consistent with a cognitive appraisal theory of emotion as discussed in Chapter 7. An emotion is a:

mental state of readiness that arises from cognitive appraisals of events or thoughts; has a phenomenological tone; is accompanied by physiological processes; is often expressed physically (e.g., in gestures, posture, facial features, heart rate increases or pupil dilation); and may result in specific actions to affirm or cope with the emotion, depending on its nature and meaning for the person having it.

(Bagozzi et al., 1999, p. 184)

Surprisingly, while it is self-evident that tourism is a pleasurable experience which should produce positive emotions, when we turn to the tourism and services literature to try to understand how such pleasurable emotions are produced, we find a lack of supporting theory. Almost without exception, the tourism literature appears to assume that emotions from tourism or services encounters are inherent in the service attributes themselves (Adhikari et al., 2013; Ali et al., 2015; Hosany et al., 2015; Tasci and Ko, 2016). This view ignores the role of the consumer in the elicitation of emotion and, more importantly, a significant body of relevant theory and practice from psychology and neuroscience, including cognitive appraisal theory. Adopting cognitive appraisal theory provides an explanation as to why two tourists may have different emotional reactions (or no emotional reaction at all) during the same experience. Although certain positive experiences may be usually associated with particular emotional responses (i.e. delight), such experiences do not necessarily elicit that emotion. Instead, emotions are elicited by a cognitive process of interpretation, evaluation and appraisal.

In the on-site experience the visitor engages in a co-creation process of more or less intensity. Pine and Gilmore (1999) use the metaphor of a theatre for this process but others emphasize co-creation of the experience between the visitor and the staff members (Hjalager and Konu, 2011), other visitors (Binkhorst and Den Dekker, 2009; Rihova et al., 2013) and information technology (Cabiddu et al., 2013). From a psychological perspective, co-creation creates attention (Chapter 6) and influences the type of immediate sensory stimuli that are perceived and appraised by the customer (Ma et al., 2013).

The emotional, spiritual, learning or other psychological outcomes elicited from an experience by an individual in the course of the process of an experience must be encoded in memory to be remembered. The immediate outcomes of an experience include transfer into short-term memory of aspects of the experience, emotional responses determined by cognitive appraisal outcomes and perhaps change in attitude towards the experience overall. The particular aspects of an experience remembered are subject to a number of biases: for example, more emotional, goal congruent or ‘peak’ experiences tend to be remembered better, leading to a unique outcome for every person. Long-term memories of an experience may be formed, along with summative evaluations of satisfaction and perceived value. Only a small proportion of short-term memories are transferred into long-term memory and it is these which, if recollected, may be called memorable experiences. These memories may be reinforced by mementos or souvenirs long after the experience. The process of a recollection of a memory is reconstructive and subject to psychological biases. It is also important to distinguish between memories of an event and memories of an evaluation of an event. Thus we may not recollect an experience but remember that the experience was valuable.

A general organizing framework for an on-site experience process is given in Fig. 1.1. The first components of experience are the motivation and goals of the visitor, along with the knowledge embedded in culture stories and symbols that are relevant to the context. These affect the visitor's interest and engagement in, and their absorption of, the experience; and influence what they pay attention to during the experience. The prior knowledge of the visitor is al...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• PART I CREATING MEMORABLE EXPERIENCES – THEORIES AND FRAMEWORK
• PART II PRE-EXPERIENCE STAGE: CUSTOMER INPUTS
• PART III ON-SITE EXPERIENCE
• PART IV POST-EXPERIENCE STAGE: OUTCOMES
• PART V EXPERIENCE DESIGN CASES
• PART VI CONCLUSION
• Index
• Backcover