Journal of Hospitality Marketing & Management

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Conceptualizing Experience: A Tourist Based

Approach

Serena Volo

To cite this article: Serena Volo (2009) Conceptualizing Experience: A Tourist Based
Approach, Journal of Hospitality Marketing & Management, 18:2-3, 111-126, DOI:
10.1080/19368620802590134

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Journal of Hospitality Marketing & Management, 18:111–126, 2009
Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 1936-8623 print/1936-8631 online
DOI: 10.1080/19368620802590134

Conceptualizing Experience: A Tourist

1936-8631
1936-8623
WHMM
Journal of Hospitality Marketing & Management,
Management Vol. 18, No. 2-3, December 2008: pp. 1–26

Based Approach

SERENA VOLO
Conceptualizing
S. Volo Experience

School of Economics and Management, Free University of Bozen,

Bozen-Bozano, Italy

Despite considerable research on the topic of ‘tourist experience’,

its contribution to tourism theory and its exploitation for the pur-
pose of creating practical benefits for marketing practices, remain
unclear. The present study reviews the existing literature and then
presents a novel approach to interpreting experience in tourism by:
(a) integrating the space and time dimensions into the ‘tourist
experience’ concept, thereby shedding light on its nature and sig-
nificance; and (b) examining tourists’ spontaneous annotations
on their travel experiences. Marketing implication and suggestions
are provided for the benefit of tourism practitioners.

KEYWORDS Tourist experience, time and space, marketing, blogs

INTRODUCTION

Academics, practitioners and enterprises have paid increasing attention to

consumers’ experience and its constituents over the past few decades. Pine
and Gilmore (1999) successfully argued the emerging of an “experience
economy” in which: (a) companies personally engage consumers through
staged events; (b) experiences become offerings in the marketplace; and (c)
consumers’ hearts are captured by the memorability of the experience.
Given the experiential nature of tourism, the topic is receiving growing
attention in literature, and since the sixties the tourist experience has been
extensively investigated. Quan and Wang (2004) recognized two broad aca-
demic perspectives in the studies of tourism experience: (1) a social science
approach (e.g.: Cohen, 1979; Lee & Crompton, 1992; MacCannell, 1973, 1976;

Address correspondence to Serena Volo, PhD, School of Economics and Management,

Free University of Bozen, Via Sernesi 1, Bozen-Bozano, 39100, Italy. E-mail: SVolo@unibz.it

111
112 S. Volo

Urry, 1990; Van, 1980) with a focus on the “peak touristic experience”—usually
derived from attractions and being the motivator to tourism—as contrasted
with the daily life experience, and (2) a marketing/management approach
(e.g.: Moutinho, 1987; Swarbrooke & Horner, 1999) based on the centrality
of the tourist, with emphasis on the consumer-centric experience and there-
fore, integrating the “supporting consumer experiences”—derived from the
activities facilitating the peak experience, such as transportation, accommo-
dation, food consumption and other additional services.
Experiences with different forms of tourism and of different typologies
of tourists have also been extensively studied, e.g., holidaymakers (Wickens,
2002), urban tourists (Page, 2002), sport tourists (Bouchet, Lebrun &
Auvergne, 2004), backpackers (Uriely, Yonay, & Simchai, 2002; Noy, 2004),
food experience seekers (Quan & Wang, 2004), cultural tourists (Prentice,
2001), and heritage tourists (Beeho & Prentice, 1997). While each of these
studies focus on a particular type of tourist’s experience, together they offer
theoretical and empirical analysis of the issue and provide insights for inte-
grative approaches to the concept of ‘tourist experience.’ A comprehensive
theoretical study is provided by Uriely’s tourist experience conceptual
development analysis (2005). In his work, Uriely, while depicting the mild
passage from a modernist approach to tourist experience to a post-modernist
one, identifies four major developments that have accompanied the process:
(a) a shift from the sharp differentiation of everyday life and tourism experi-
ences (e.g.: Cohen, 1972, 1979; MacCannell, 1973) towards a re-conjunction
between leisure and work/everyday life activities (e.g.: Lash & Urry, 1994;
Munt, 1994; Pizam, Uriely, & Reichel, 2000; Ryan, 2002a); (b) a move from
an homogeneous portrayal of tourists’ motivations to “multi-type individ-
ual(s)” (Uriely, 2005) who search “micro-types” of tourism activities (Wickens,
2002); (c) a passage from objects to subjects centrality in shaping the expe-
rience (e.g.: Uriely et al., 2002; Wickens, 2002); and (d) a change from con-
flicting assertions to “complementary interpretation” (Uriely, 2005).
Thus, established approaches favor either: (a) a social science
approach – including the investigation of motivations, activities, interests,
meanings and attitudes, the search for authenticity and the focus on subjec-
tive experiences (Quan & Wang, 2004; Uriely, 2005) – or (b) a consumer
behavior approach that includes the exploration of different typology of
tourism activities by looking at the satisfaction or quality experienced by
tourists, the importance of human interactions, the effect of familiarity, prior
knowledge and past experience, and the role of external stimuli (Baum,
2002; Go, 2005; Gursoy & McCleary, 2004; Milman & Pizam, 1995; Tasci &
Knutson, 2004). Despite the variety of studies, still many questions remain
open: How do tourists conceive the experience? Do they have a mental
framework or are the researchers trying to impose one on them? How can
we influence tourists’ experiences? The purpose of this study is to address
such questions by: (a) investigating tourist experience definition and
 Conceptualizing Experience 113

components through the information derived by the social science and

marketing/management approaches; and (b) examining the meaning of
tourist experience from the tourists’ point of view.
The remainder of the article consists of four parts. In the first part pre-
vious studies concerning tourist experience are reviewed with attention to
definition and nature of the experience and their marketing usefulness. In
the second part, a conceptual framework that centers on the consumers’
point of view and which integrates the space and time dimensions is pro-
posed. An analysis of tourists’ spontaneous annotations that supports the
theoretical framework is presented from which a definition of tourist experi-
ence is crafted. In the third part marketing suggestions are offered to tour-
ism destinations and enterprises to understand the conditions necessary to
revitalize their offerings and to satisfy the increasingly sophisticated experi-
ence seekers. The nature of the objects and subjects that constitute the
tourist experience are integrated with the tasks of planning, managing and
marketing the tourism experience. Lastly, the implications and limitations of
the proposed approach are discussed and directions for future research
given.

LITERATURE REVIEW
Definitions
The Oxford English Dictionary (1989) defines1 experience as:

(1) The actual observation of facts or events, considered as a source of

knowledge. (2) The fact of being consciously the subject of a state or
condition, or of being consciously affected by an event. (3) What has
been experienced; the events that have taken place within the knowl-
edge of an individual, a community, mankind at large, either during a
particular period or generally. (4) The fact of being consciously the sub-
ject of a state or condition, or of being consciously affected by an event.
Also an instance of this; a state or condition viewed subjectively; an
event by which one is affected.

Further, experience(s) has/have been defined as: (a) “a steady flow of

fantasies, feelings, and fun” (Holbrook & Hirschman, 1982, p. 132); (b) “the
act of living through an observation of events and also refers to training and
the subsequent knowledge and skill acquired” (Hoch, 2002, p. 448); (c) the
“result of encountering, undergoing, or living through situations” and “trig-
gered stimulations to the senses, the heart, and the mind” (Schmitt, 1999,
p. 25); (d) “the summation of a consumer’s past product related consump-
tion activities” (Alba & Hutchinson, 1987, as cited by Dodd, Laverie, Wilcox,
& Duhan, 2005, p. 6); (e) [affective experience] “the result of a process of
114 S. Volo

assimilating the world into a structure of cognitive maps or schemas”2

(Eckblad, 1980, 1981a, 1981b, as quoted by Vittersø, Vorkinn, Vistad, &
Vaagland, 2000). An experience is created, according to Pine & Gilmore,
when “a company intentionally uses services as the stage and goods as
props, to engage individual customers in a way that creates a memorable
event” (Pine & Gilmore, 1999, p. 11). Moreover, it has been suggested that
customers’ experience is the essential basis of the value proposition
between service providers and consumers, and that the customers’ experi-
ence varies along an active to passive continuum and the affect varies from
absorption to immersion (Pine & Gilmore, 1999). The tourist experience has
been defined as: (a) “the culmination of a given experience” formed by
tourists “when they are visiting and spending time in a given tourists loca-
tion” (Graefe & Vaske, 1987, as cited by Page, Brunt, Busby, & Connell,
2001, p. 412); (b) “a complex combination of factors that shape the tourist’s
feeling and attitude towards his or her visit” (Page et al., 2001, p. 412–413);
(c) “what the tourist is seeking” (Volo, 2005, p. 205); (d) “an example of
hedonic consumption” (Go, 2005, p. 81). Finally, however, this study agrees
with Chhetri, Arrowsmith, and Jackson (2004) in concluding that “there is
no single theory that defines the meaning and extent of tourist experiences,
although a number of authors have made attempts to formulate models by
generalizing and aggregating information” (Chhetri et al., 2004, p. 34).

Complexity/Nature
The complexity of the tourist experience is highlighted from the findings
and conclusions of many studies and involves difficulties in: defining it,
identifying and measuring the components, and defining how it changes
according to the characteristics of the individual tourists. Cohen, in his phe-
nomenological approach, saw tourist experiences as opportunities for dif-
ferentiation from everyday life (Cohen, 1972, 1979) and he identified
“different modes of the tourists experiences” (Cohen, 1979, p. 180). Quan
and Wang (2004) suggested that tourists’ experiences must be seen as an
organic whole in which peak (art, culture and heritage) and supporting
experiences (accommodations, transportations, shopping, entertainment
and food establishments) complement each other. However, the dynamism
of the market can mutate the character of some tourism activities and open
a whole new set of experiences (e.g., space travel, virtual reality). Lash and
Urry (1994) indeed questioned the work-everyday life dichotomy introduced
by Cohen and extended the status of tourist to many different situations
whether consumers were enjoying attractions at the destinations or in a vir-
tual reality setting. Cole and Scott (2004) proposed four stages of the tour-
ists’ experience, namely, “dimensions of performance quality, dimension of
experience quality, overall satisfaction, and revisit intentions” (Cole & Scott,
2004, p. 79). For Graefe and Vaske the key characteristics are emotional
 Conceptualizing Experience 115

involvement of the tourist, significant interaction between tourists and tour-

ism system and active participation in the experience (Graefe & Vaske,
1987, as cited by Volo, 2005). Hetherington, Daniel and Brown (1993) “con-
sidered experiences in natural landscapes as contextual and multi-sensory.”
They noted, for example, that “sound and motion are important determi-
nants of visitor experiences, particularly for riverscapes” (Hetherington et al.,
1993, as cited by Chhetri et al. 2004, p. 33). According to Volo (2004), “tour-
ism experience can be characterized by the following four dimensions: (a)
Accessibility dimension – how accessible is the tourism experience to one
who may seek it? (b) Affective transformation dimension – what degree of
affective transformation is experienced? (c) Convenience - what level of
effort is required to access the experience? (d) Value – what is the benefit
received per unit of cost?” (p. 373). Finally, the variability of the experience
is another aspect to be considered, and while it is clear that “different peo-
ple may engage in different experiences” (Uriely, 2005, p. 205–206), it can
be even more surprising that the same tourist activity can create different
experiences in people within the same market segment (e.g., the backpack-
ers of Uriely et al., 2002; the holidaymakers of Wickens, 2002). One more
degree of complexity comes from the fact that once in the marketplace,
experiences follow the rules of the market. There are supply and demand
rules for them as well as there are for goods and services (Pine & Gilmore,
1999).

Measurement
Tourists’ experiences have been traditionally studied by: (a) structured sur-
veys; (b) travel diaries; (c) structured or unstructured interviews; (d) obser-
vant participation (e) spontaneous travel narrative on periodicals (e.g.,
Takinami,1998); (f) memory-work (e.g., Small, 1999). Recently, alternative
unobtrusive methods have been used in the field of environmental sciences,
varying from diaries to videos, sensory devices and use of GPS systems (e.g.,
Hull & Stewart, 1995; Chhetri & Arrowsmith, 2002; Arnberger & Brandenburg,
2002; Janowsky & Becker, 2002; Rauhala, Erkkonen, & Iisalo, 2002). Such
methods, although very expensive in some cases, appear to be promising in
the search for emotions, moods and feelings of visitors. The topic of mea-
surement is of high interest, and a full examination of the measurement
instruments and models used in previous research is warranted. Although
such an examination goes beyond the scope of the present investigation,
certain questions arise: How can we measure something that we have not
clearly defined? Does our theoretical definition match the tourists’ definition
of experience? How do we define a good versus a bad experience? Some of
the marketing focused research may help us to clarify such issues.
Evaluating the effect of various factors on tourists’ satisfaction, under-
standing the how past experience influence future consumption, assessing
116 S. Volo

the quality of the experience and understanding how to stage experiences

for the benefit of both tourists and industry have been the most studied top-
ics in tourism marketing literature. The most intriguing issue has been to
measure the tourist experience characteristics and meanings and its relation-
ship to motivations, needs, attractions, tourist typologies, past and future
experiences, familiarity, authenticity, knowledge, learning, memory, and
information search behaviour (e.g., Gursoy & McCleary, 2004; Milman &
Pizam, 1995; Tasci & Knutson, 2004; Vittersø et al., 2000). How advertising
affects product experience has been studied by Braun-LaTour and LaTour
(2005). They concluded that, “in the wake of the experience, ads can no
longer direct consumers’ attentional resources.” These investigators studied
the effect of advertising shown before and after experiencing a product.
These experiments indicate that advertising shown “prior to a product or
service encounter can frame how a consumer perceives it” while shown
“post experience can be used to help consumers reconstruct their prior
experience” (Braun-LaTour & LaTour, 2005, p. 21). These findings support
Hoch’s theory that “true experience is encoded on-line as it unfolds, but
experience is also reinterpreted as decisions are rationalized” (Hoch, 2002,
p. 451).

HOW DO TOURISTS CONCEIVE THE EXPERIENCE

This section presents a conceptualization of the tourists’ experience that

integrates the space and time dimensions into the tourist experience
concept and examines tourists’ spontaneous annotations on their travel
experiences.

Time and Space Dimensions of the Tourist Experience

In an attempt to re-conceptualize the tourist experience, the WTO definition
of tourist can be useful: tourist is an overnight visitor that travels “outside
his/her usual environment for less than a year and for a purpose other than
being employed in the place visited” (WTO, 1994). Although this is a more
operational than a conceptual definition, there is widespread agreement on
it and therefore it is of broad applicability. Tourism is then, temporally and
spatially defined. It is clearly different than work. It represents however,
only one way free time can be used.
Sociologist who studied the use of time agree that the human behav-
ior can be seen as falling into four general categories: (1) paid work
(contracted time); (2) household work and family care (committed time);
(3) personal care (personal time); (4) free time. Therefore, people
accumulate experiences in any of the settings illustrated in table 1, but a per-
son can have a tourism experience only outside of the “usual environment”
 Conceptualizing Experience 117

TABLE 1 Temporal and Spatial Dimensions of the Experiences

Contracted Committed Personal

Time Time Time Free time

Usual Work experiences House and Personal care Leisure

environment family experiences experiences experiences
Non-usual ↓ ↓ ↓
environment Tourism experiences

and outside of “contracted time”. By attributing importance to places in

the tourist experience, the proposed approach agrees with: (a) Cohen’s
statement, “If any experience could be virtually had in any location, no
experience will be place-bound any more; then why should people
travel?” (Cohen, 1995, p. 20); and (b) Ryan’s emphasis on the perception,
role, use made of time during a holiday, that he defined as “a process of
displacement [. . .] into another place and a special time” (Ryan, 2002b, p.
206).

Observing Tourists’ Experiences: An Unobtrusive Method

Traditional methods of research, whether they were tourists’ independent
oral or written reports, surveys or interviews, did adhere to a protocol dic-
tated by the researcher’s objectives. Unobtrusive methods on the other
hand do not involve direct elicitation of data from the subject by the
researcher. The new communication media are creating great opportunities
to unobtrusively obtain data. The dimension and variety of topics covered
by the corpora available through the worldwide web is greater than any
researcher can practically collect. Seeking to capture and investigate tour-
ists’ spontaneous annotations, this study partly utilized findings3 of a
recently performed exploratory analysis on tourists’ blogs – i.e., travel jour-
nals or diaries available on the worldwide web. Such on-line narratives are
meant to accompany travelers during their trip and to allow them to simul-
taneously share their experiences with family and friends around the
world. Consequently, these blogs represent a totally unplanned and
researcher-uncontaminated description of their vacations. The analysis of
the blogs was part of an exploratory investigation (Volo & Fisichella, 2007)
aimed at testing the usage of the TaLTaC2 software (Lexical and Textual
Automatic Processing for Corpus and Content Analysis) for these types of
written reports. The corpus consisted of 36 tourists’ blogs, written in
English, by travellers who had vacationed in Italy. The authors of the 36
blogs analysed included 17 women and 19 men who were visiting Italy
from 8 different countries of origin. Tourists’ mother tongue was English
in 32 of the 36 cases (UK, US, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Ireland).
118 S. Volo

In the other four cases the authors were visiting from either Belgium or
Denmark. The following are samples of the bloggers’ reports on their visits:

Blog 1: My favorite part of the whole Pisan experience however was

looking at the Camposanto.- I recommend reading The Borgia Bride by
Jeane Kalogridis before going to Naples/seeing the Borgia apartments, it
will give you a whole new meaningful experience. - We also got to see
the Scuola di San Antonio which had wonderful frescos by Titian. We
had to go through a humidity chamber and everything. Reservations are
truly necessary for this experience as well.

Blog 4: I had intended to go to the Italian Lakes, but that day the
weather was particularly dismal. So instead I sulked & felt miserable &
tried to decide how early was too early to go to the airport. Anyway, it is
all an experience.

Blog 5: He did not know where the street was, it was funny. By now
having had such bad experiences with taxis we all had a sense of humor
about it all.

Blog 7: Pope . . . He greeted us in seven different languages, said a few

prayers in Italian and it was overall an amazing experience.

Blog 9: Venice was an unforgettable experience. Surreal, dream-like, just

like an altered state of reality.

Blog 22: Florence . . . The bus ride . . . was one of the most nauseating
experiences of my life because the driver was crazy. - When we walked
by the duomo I just stopped because I really could not believe how big
it was. It was one of the most awesome experiences just to look at it.

Blog 24: Rome . . . While one might think of today as modernized, civi-
lized, . . . I’m seeing, after experiences in this city, just how far from the
truth that statement is. Though, I must tell you . . . I’ve barely had time
for experiences.

From the analysis of the blog narratives it can be seen that tourists refer
to “visiting a place” and “seeing a man made or natural attraction” as ‘having
an experience.’ They distinguish pleasant and unpleasant experiences using
several adjectives but they consider all of them ‘an experience.’ They state
that getting prior knowledge (e.g., reading a book) about an attraction will
enhance the experience. They consider visiting a major attraction (peak
experiences), eating a gelato, and using transportation (supporting experiences)
as an experience. They acknowledge the existence of staged experiences. Sim-
ilarly, from an examination of the tourism literature can be seen that the
 Conceptualizing Experience 119

word experience often becomes a synonym for visit, activity, motivation,

trip, escape, behavior, emotion, perception, event, response to a stimulus,
consumption, cognitive or affective process, interest, product, observation,
service, encounter, attraction, novelty, journey, seeing, feeling, visiting,
learning, conceptualizing, knowing, reasoning, believing, recognizing.
While all of these contribute to the total tourist experience, or may become
the experience itself, they may also go unobserved in one’s mind. That is,
what does it take for a visit, an activity, an event, a view, a gelato, a feeling,
knowledge or learning to become experience, the tourist experience?

Conceptualizing the Tourist’ Experience

Tourism is essentially a marketplace of experience and tourists provide the
‘mental places’ where the tourist experience happens. Although this con-
ception considers experience as something that is very personal and not
directly accessible for observation by anyone other than the person having
the experience, an attempt is made to re-define tourist experience.
Following the experience embodiment theorists, the holistic consumer
experience can be seen as made of two facets: a phenomenological level –
of which consumers are fully aware – and a cognitive level where the trans-
formation and learning happen (Tsai, 2005). Experience is composed
(Figure 1) of all the events that occur between sensation (i.e., an observer’s
awareness of an energy form impinging on a receptor physiologically
designed to transduce it) and perception (i.e., the interpretation of the sen-
sation), as well as memory (i.e., the subsequent organization and recall of
such interpretations), which will have been modified and conditioned in the
interim by many if not all of the prior and subsequent occurrences of this
‘sensation, perception, interpretation, sequence.’
Finally, based on the literature review, the WTO definition and the
insights from tourists’ spontaneous annotations, a “tourist experience” can
be defined as any occurrence that happens to a person outside the “usual
environment” and the “contracted time” for which a sequence of the follow-
ing events happens: energy reflecting the state of the environment impinges

Occurrence Energy Senses Perception Brain Cognition Experience

FIGURE 1 The experience sequence.

120 S. Volo

on sensory organs, the energy pattern is transmitted centrally and is inter-

preted and categorized according to one’s knowledge acquired through
time and is integrated and may be stored in the form of memory under
some conditions (and thus some learning will occur). When perceiving and
interpreting the incoming stream of information about the external world,
the novelty of the perceptions and the novelty of the external events that
gave rise to them, acts as a driver that allows, in fact directs, the human
mind to differentiate between external occurrences and how they are expe-
rienced. Moreover, the human capacity of memory allows individuals to
anticipate experiences, and their innate ability to categorize dissimilar
things, allows them to sort ‘anticipated experiences’ into those they might
seek and those they would avoid.

MARKETING AND RESEARCH SUGGESTIONS

Understanding the tourists’ definition of experience from the customer point

of view has a number of implications. It gives emphasis to the individual
ability to create his/her own experience no matter what ‘tourist experience’
marketers sold or whether a person is engaged in cultural, urban, sport, or
natural tourism. A tourist experience happens in the mind of the tourist and
the ‘essence’ is encoded in the ‘experience sequence’ that makes an individ-
ual’s experiences unique. Thus, operationally defined, tourist experiences
are made up of different components meant to equate it to activities
engaged in while on holiday. However, both ways of looking at the experi-
ence – viz., ‘the experience essence’ and ‘the experience as offering’ – can
have validity, be useful and be applied. While the first one may demystify
the role of marketers in creating the experience, the second one relies
heavily on them. While the first happens rarely on command and is very
subjective, there is a plethora of the second in the marketplace. That is,
there is a variety of ‘objects’ for the tourist experience to happen.
Including the tourists’ point of view in the definition of experience
could potentially completely change the way marketers view the consumer
and what assumptions they make about them when designing tourism
offerings. However, because of the human capacity to anticipate, sort and
reinterpret the essence of experiences, there is plenty of room for marketers’
actions. Tourists come into the marketplace shopping for an experience with
certain attributes – even if one of the attributes is a lack of predefinition – and
purveyors of tourism services offer opportunities for their customers to
access such experiences.
The basic idea of tourism marketing should then be: (a) to create, offer
and communicate ‘anticipated experiences’ that individuals would classify
as among those they would seek; (b) help the tourists to ‘categorize experi-
ences offerings’ in easy market-defined ways; and (c) to suggest ways to
 Conceptualizing Experience 121

‘reinterpret the tourists experiences’ by post-intervention of the tourist mind.

The problem for tourism marketing is to identify and characterize the expe-
riences that will fall into the category of ‘anticipated experiences that indi-
viduals would seek’ and then to abstract the controllable drivers of those
experiences so as to somehow create them into ‘tourism experience offer-
ings’ that can be easily categorized. This is difficult to do reliably for all of
the reasons attributable to the highly variant nature of experience previ-
ously discussed, but it can be much improved if we can better understand
the higher valence dimensions of ‘tourism experience essence’ and their
drivers. To achieve this it is necessary to unobtrusively access individuals’
‘tourism experience’ and to put as little investigator and selection biases as
possible into its translation, its measurement and its analysis.
Subjectivity of the experience is the key, and this is evidenced by the
fact that two observers will often report identical events very differently, or
completely different events as nearly identical. It is always true in behav-
ioral research that in studying experiences the investigator should avoid as
much as possible overlaying their interpretation on the reports, and it is
especially true in tourism marketing research. Unobtrusive methods appear
to have the potential to improve the study of tourists experience and the
role it plays in consumer behavior, and leading therefore to an improved
understanding its practical implications for marketing. Academicians should
also examine the theoretical concept by cross-cultural investigations, as it is
possible to speculate that while the essence of the tourist experience is
highly individually defined, anticipation, sorting and reinterpreting activi-
ties may cluster similarly by cultural groups. In fact a number of predictions
can be made and hypotheses advanced as to how different cultural groups
would be expected to construct and report their common ‘tourist experiences’
if the conclusions put forth in the present study have validity. For example,
historically more empirical (mostly western) cultures might be expected to
require more the tangible aspects of an experience to construct a tourism
experience critical mass while historically more intuitive (mostly eastern)
cultures might be expected to rely less on the tangible aspects. The pleasant-
ness of the essence experience will be determined to some, and probably a
large degree, by the classification method a tourist has used in their minds
to anticipate or experience a ‘tourist event,’ and this will be culturally influ-
enced. What is defined as pleasant in a western culture may not be similarly
classified in an eastern culture.
The ‘experience essence’ is by definition unstaged, whereas the ‘offer-
ing’ of experiences involves staged and unstaged experiences. The chal-
lenge for destinations and the industry in general is in transforming staged
experience offerings into ‘personalized experiences,’ That is, switching from
designing the tourist experience that is believed will satisfy customers’
desires into engaging tourists in the creation of their experience. That is
to embrace Prahalad and Ramaswamy (2000) shift from “customizing” to
122 S. Volo

“personalizing” the experience and allowing tourists to co-create the context

in which they develop the “essence of the experience.” By doing this the
industry will be able to gather information on the process behind the
co-creation and therefore gain valuable clues on how to create “anticipated
experiences.” Finally, whether “one views memory as a stable memory bin
or as a constructive or reconstructive process” (Braun-LaTour & LaTour,
2005), marketers’ promotional efforts should concentrate on enhancing the
“anticipated experience”, helping tourists to create ways to “sort experi-
ences” and “reinterpret experiences” with the final objective of “attaching
the consumer experientially” (Tsai, 2005, p. 433) to the tourism offering.
Experiments can be useful to explore these issues in the field of tourism
advertising and communication. Indeed, while marketers can easily access
the sphere of senses of tourists, more effort is required on the part of acade-
micians to enter the mental sequence of tourist experience, and if they do,
with near certainty benefits will derive from it.
Marketing efforts and communication should be a two-way transmis-
sion from the company to the tourist and from the tourist to the company,
and it should be done at every stage of the experience: anticipated, online,
and post experience. In this practice lies the value for the company. Any
competitor may imitate your efforts and communication towards the market
but no one can steal the reverse path, the unique communication between
your experience seeker and your company or destination.

CONCLUSIONS

Tourism is the marketplace of experiences; this marketplace can exist virtu-

ally anywhere outside one’s ‘usual environment’ and ‘committed time.’ In
this setting tourists do not simply buy products and services nor are they
attracted by sophisticated ambiance or settings. Rather, they want to have
experiences. Thus, if given the opportunity, tourists will exhibit an increase
in experience seeking and experience-interpreting behaviours. But tourists
as consumers are not fully aware of the way psychological processes give
rise to, condition or reinterpret experiences. Still they can recognize such
events when they happen, and they can sort them into good ones and bad
ones as they see them. Their memory is the only deputy to recognising tour-
ist experiences. Therefore including their unbiased comments, unobtrusively
obtained, can help destinations, academicians and the industry to orches-
trate those offerings that can create memorable experiences. The challenge
for researchers is twofold: (a) how to reach consensus on an acceptable
definition of tourist experience, and (b) how to manage, plan and market
that tourist experience.
This research has contributed to the tourist experience investigations with
a novel approach that incorporates tourists spontaneous travel annotations
 Conceptualizing Experience 123

and redefines tourists’ experience by emphasising the role of the space and
time continuum and by distinguishing experiences from any other occurrence
may happen to a person when engaging tourism activities. There are how-
ever, some limitations that should be addressed. The literature review needed
to incorporate a thorough analysis of the research instruments used in each
study and verify if the meaning of the word experience was somewhat forced
by the investigator or was left open to the tourist interpretation. The textual
analysis used in this study was aimed at exploring issues different than the
one under investigation here, and therefore its contribution may be chal-
lenged. Moreover, the narratives included only western tourists ignoring other
cultures and it can be argued that perhaps tourists who use blogs are a partic-
ular subgroup of tourists and therefore all generalizations should be avoided.
Future research efforts should continue to examine the tourists’ experi-
ence through different research methods that could enhance the contribu-
tion of the tourists in defining the concept of experience and the attributes
that transform occurrences into experiences. Moreover, as a supplement to
the suggestion that blog narratives can be successfully used in the study of
experience, it should be added that different cultures should be investi-
gated. The role of marketing stimuli and the ability of destinations and the
industry to create unstaged experiences requires further research and
conceptualization.

NOTES

1. These are only selected definitions of experience.

2. According to Eckblad (1981a, 1981b) “people tend to attain pleasant experiences if the per-
ceived phenomena accord well with existing schemata without resistance” (Eckblad, 1981a, 1981b as
cited by Chhetri et al, 2004, p. 34).
3. For a description of the research design refer to original work (Volo & Fisichella, 2007).

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