Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
The tourism experience as the
primary
source of value
Holbrook and Hirschmann (1982) were the fi rst to consider the consumption experience as the
primary source of value, through the fantasies, feelings and fun it generates. Since then, marketing
and tourism scholars have drifted away from utilitarian to more hedonistic and symbolic aspects
of consumption. For Palmer (2010), a customer experience is not only made of hedonistic
drives but also comprises 'hygiene' factors, that is raw stimuli appearing during the service
encounter (e.g. brand relationships, physical evidence, interpersonal contacts). In tourism, Smith
(1994) was one of the fi rst authors to include emotional and experiential elements as part of
the tourism product. Murphy, Pritchard and Smith (2000: 44) went even further in defi ning the
tourism destination as 'an amalgam of individual products and experience opportunities that
combine to form a total experience of the visited area'.
Broadening the scope, Pine and Gilmore (1999) declared the shift from a commodity- and
service-based economy to an 'experience economy' in which the consumption experience itself
becomes the primary source of value. The key challenge for companies is to produce memorable
staged experiences for their customers. A few years later, Vargo and Lusch (2004) introduced a
similar shift from the concept of 'value-in-exchange', embedded in the product and captured by
price, to that of 'value-in-use', suggesting that value is created when a product or service is
actually used. Such a value-in-use is global (it results from the total experience of tangible and
intangible elements of the servicescape) and unique to each customer (because it is contextually
interpreted by the user).
Later on, Lusch and Vargo (2006) went a step further in contending that consumers should
help companies to produce the experience and that 'the customer is always a co-creator.' Since
then, co-creation of value has become a focus of the experiential approach and tourists are seen
as playing active roles in co-creating their experiences while on vacation. For Fuchs (2004),
destination effi ciency depends on both the destination's proper allocation of available resources
and the tourist's own resource involvement. Such a combination determines the benefi ts received
by tourists and destination operators. Yuksel, Yuksel and Bilim (2010) show that tourists'
satisfaction and loyalty can be explained by the emotional associations and symbolic meanings
they develop during their destination experience. Chekalina, Fuchs and Lexhagen (2013: 62)
suggest that destinations, by their staging of intangible and tangible elements, and tourists, by
their direct participation and allocation of own resources, co-create 'experiencescapes', places
where the tourist experience occurs. They develop a conceptualization where destination
experience is seen as a transformation process of a destination's tangible, intangible resources and
human assets into the value-in-use for a customer. They also show that such a value-in-use helps
to build customer loyalty.
Conclusion
Theorizing tourist behaviour is not an easy task as tourists may show thousands of facets in their
choices and activities. In this chapter the aim was to present diverse perspectives to better
understand and conceptualize tourist behaviour. These avenues draw from a series of scientifi c
disciplines, including micro-economics, cognitive and social psychology, anthropology and
sociology. Tourism scholars have fi rst drawn on 'Grand Models' taken from the psychological
consumer behaviour literature, such as the Engel and Blackwell model, in order to isolate the
cognitive steps or 'building blocks' leading to purchase. Other authors have developed models
deemed to be more tourist-specifi c as they encapsulate the well-established characteristics
of services such as intangibility, inseparability, heterogeneity and perishability, as well as the
