Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
major travel motives: escape from a perceived mundane environment, exploration, evaluation
of self, relaxation, prestige, regression, enhancement of kinship relationships and facilitation of
social interactions. Other researchers have presented classifi cations of motivations, which
added to our understanding of the diversity of motivations for travelling (Krippendorf 1987;
Moutinho 1987; Mcintosh and Goeldner 1990; Crompton and McKay 1997). Overall, most
studies identifi ed as key vacation motivations: getting away, relaxing, social connections, learning,
and improving one's own capabilities. Those motivations are directly connected to the experi-
ence tourists expect while at the destination, and therefore they are central to the understanding
of the tourist experience.
Successful tourism products are those that achieve satisfaction for these motivations. However,
very different types of experience exist depending on the strength of intervention from the
tourism industry and the strength and direction of tourists' motivations.
• On a fi rst level, various forms of connections with the tourism industry can be sought.
For instance, tourists travelling independently perhaps wish to immerse themselves in the
culture of a new country (particularly if they decide to stay with local people, share eating
experiences, etc.). Therefore they may seek limited contacts with the tourism industry. On
the other side of the spectrum, consumers may prefer tourist experiences within holiday
resorts or cruise ships where everything is planned for the consumer (especially within an
all-inclusive offer). Often, even the burden of making daily decisions is removed from
consumers, allowing them another form of total immersion with their holiday. Between
those two extremes, various other forms of tourist experience exist especially since over the
years consumers have evolved towards more alternative forms of tourism (Stamboulis and
Skayannis 2009).
• On a second level, it is important to understand the extent to which tourists might require
home comforts, familiar cultural environments while at the destination, or whether they
want to immerse themselves fully in the culture/country visited and escape familiar cultural
norms. In other terms, consumers might travel thousands of miles only to stay very much in
their own socio-cultural environmental bubble (Cohen 1979). Typically, mass Mediterranean
packaged resort destinations can reproduce the cultural environment of British tourists
(food, drinks, pubs, newspapers, satellite television, language, etc.) and only a few of the
visited destination assets (sea, sand and sun and goods at a lower price than at home) are
required.
Pine and Gilmore (1998) argued that companies could gain competitive advantage by differentiating
experiences according to the degree of active or passive participation of individuals with the
service environment. The relation with the environment could either be one of immersion (the
individual is fully immersed in the experience, living the experience through all senses and often
in communion with others) or absorption (the individual becomes absorbed by what he sees/does,
but this implication does not necessarily involve other processes). Pine and Gilmore advocated that
the more the four realms were present in an encounter, the richer the experience would be.
The approach adopted by Pine and Gilmore can be satisfying for leisure/entertainment
experiences but is insuffi cient to translate the variety of experiences observed in the tourism
world. Underneath, the four realms proposed by Pine and Gilmore have been revisited to take
on board existing knowledge from the tourism fi eld (
Figure 9.1
).
The fi rst axis is inspired by
Cohen's work on the environmental bubble (1979) that views tourists as ranging from individuals
who seek total immersion with the country visited (non-institutionalized tourists) to tourists
who prefer to stay in their own environmental bubble (institutionalized tourists). The other axis
