Contemporary Approaches Studying Customer Experience in Tourism Research

Ranging from the romanticism era to the postmodern paradigm and the experiential approach, this chapter reexamines the fundamental roots of the consumption experience concept while addressing the conceptualizations and nature of customer experience. In this context, the concept of customer experience in the tourism field is outlined. We set out to readdress the essence of the customer experience in the light of the consumer value (CV) as a relevant empirical ground to study it. Hence, this chapter revisits the intricate epistemological and methodological connection of the customer experience to CV. This leads to a rediscussion of the key role of customer introspection approach while outlining the narration side in studying this intimate connection of both concepts in the tourism field.

The customer experience (CX) in the field of tourism and hospitality has captured new heights. The study aims to understand how CX has been studied in the tourism and hospitality field history using bibliometric analysis. A total of 188 research articles in the Web of Science (WoS) database were selected for bibliometric analysis using VOSviewer from 2008 to 2021. The citation analysis highlighted the most influential journals published in CX within the tourism and hospitality field. Bibliographic coupling along with content analysis helps to categorize intellectual structure in six clusters: (1) Customer experience in the physical environment, (2) Technology-oriented customer experience, (3) Customer experience as driver of well-being, (4) Emotional value in the consumption experience, (5) Behavioral intentions-oriented customer experience, and (6) Total customer experience. Even though bibliometric analysis has gained attraction in business research and growing trends of the experience economy, CX within the tourism and hospitality field was not yet explored comprehensively. The current study was an effort to fill this gap by examining how customer experience in the tourism and hospitality context has been evolved historically. Theoretical, social, and practical implications are presented to establish future research directions.

Understanding customer experience remains the holy grail in marketing and tourism theory and practice. Although research techniques continue to evolve and improve, capturing the depths of what customers experience while they experience remains an arduous task let alone what its roots are. In response, this chapter sets out and illustrates an autohermeneutic phenomenological approach that taps into the deeper levels of experience to comprehend its extremities and processes. It places experience at the center of (self-)observation and thereby grants direct access to the entire “lifeworld” experience spectrum in its ultimate and purest form from the subject's perspective (be it a consumer, a customer or a tourist) and thereby rendering a first-hand view of the deeper levels of the pre-core-post journey of experience. This thought piece advances the methodological underpinnings of experience by offering a novel perspective to researchers and practitioners. This is brought by a supporting framework composed of five methodological guidelines to examine the multifaceted characteristics of experience, starting with its inception including its twists, turns and evolvements over time, pertaining to the viscerally intensive experience realms such as tourism.

Customer experience (CX) has become a major concern of business managers around the world and is considered a determinant factor of continuing corporate success. Despite the growing number of research studies focusing on the topic, knowledge remains underexamined in general, and specifically in terms of online users. Understanding how online platforms inspire travel experience is increasingly pertinent as visual contents acquire insignificance. This is especially relevant when travel is restricted such as during the COVID-19 outbreak. Nevertheless, there is a gap in the literature research on online CX in online visitor attractions. The study aimed to investigate the visitors' reviews of online visits during the lockdown. The research has followed the Netnography approach as modern qualitative research to understand the online CX of visiting virtually the attractions.

The results revealed three dimensions of cyber-tourist experiences related to the tourism-driven with its four subdimensions, the emotional reaction and expectation, and satisfaction and behavior intentions. The study adds to the better knowledge of the modern research methods dealing with the cyber-customer experience (CCX) by examining the Netnography method.

This research is a pioneering attempt to mitigate the impact of COVID-19 on tourists' experience and to highlight the opportunities for tourism practitioners to profit from the online presence, to be more accessible, and to increase their traffic to guaranty their online visibility.

The most commonly described components of customer experience include cognitive and affective aspects. However, the subjective self-reported methods traditionally applied in tourism research cannot fully represent the instant, dynamic, and affective nature of customer experience. Therefore, there is a need for moment-based approaches and longitudinal methods in tourism research. The chapter provides a selective review of measures that can be used to assess the affective aspects of customer experience. Taking into account the advantages and limitations of each method, the integration of self-reported scales, moment-based psychophysiological techniques, and longitudinal methods should be considered as the best approach to measuring affective components of customer experience in tourism. This holistic interdisciplinary approach will help researchers and tourism practitioners understand the relationship between affective and cognitive components of tourists' pre-visit, onsite, and post-visit experience, as well as evaluate the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, identify weak points of tourists' customer journey, and maximize total travel experience.

This chapter renews the thought on conceptualizing customer experience (CX) through the perspective of customer knowledge management (CKM). It bridges two pathways: Tacit Knowledge and Lived experience of the customer. Hence, refreshing the CX conceptualization aims to grasp the depths of the in situ service lived experience by examining the tacit knowledge forms issued from the lived experience of the client-curist in the well-being tourism. Dealing primarily with the consumption of service experience into the thalassotherapy centers is already an uphill task. This is due to its subtle and embedded experiential nature. Notwithstanding these challenges, it offers substantial knowledge about the conceptualized customer experiential knowledge (CEK). Hence, a generation of a pool of items measuring the customer experiential knowledge-process competence construct (CEK-PC) comes to begin the empirical development of the customer experiential knowledge management (CEKM) approach (as developed by Jaziri, 2013, 2019a). It also offers empirical evidence that corroborates CEK conceptualization (Jaziri-Bouagina, 2017). Through the CEK-PC, this chapter explores the competence of management levels in adopting a phenomenological vision and a global approach of ethnography to acquire CEK for treating, sharing, and using it to implement an experience-based innovation. The thrust of the construct was preserved via the Q-sort technique that has assessed the content validity through two sorting rounds. Forty-two items are retained representing a first step of the measure development.

To be successful in today's experience economy, hospitality and tourism firms need to be attentive to detail and have the right information to manage a variety of aspects related to their businesses and their performance, not least when it comes to experiences. The old-fashioned way of producing offerings based on the management's and organization's knowledge and traditional way of operating may not suffice in the future. The attention must instead be centered on the actual source of data – the customer – as they are the ones assessing the value of the offering, and they are the ones, hopefully, willing to pay for the experiences.

At the same time hospitality and tourism managers get inadequate information and support from the data available in their management systems to help them in their efforts to create memorable experiences for their customers. The objective here is, by using theoretical frameworks and concepts like the resourced-based view (RBV) and customer experiential knowledge management (CEKM), among others, to analyze and develop the EA-approach from a strategical perspective to enhance the possibilities to create and maintain competitive advantages for the hospitality and tourism firms, foremost the SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises).

The identified solution will therefore be the implementation and use of customer-centred management systems where the focus should be aiding the process of creating experiences, increase customer value and by this strengthen the businesses' competitive advantage. This could be of particular interest postCOVID when the industry will do everything it can to bounce back at full strength.

Creating memorable tourism experiences (MTE) is vital to obtain sustained tourism visits. In the digital era, infusions of various digital technologies in tourism services without admitting tourist emotions could jeopardize the experience. Drawing from a Service-Dominant Logic (S-DL) perspective, this study explains the complexity of digital tourism experience in the service system view, highlighting the importance of emotions as resources. It is composed of actors' orchestrations, connected by shared emotions, and enabled by sensory stimuli facilitated by the digital tourism ecosystem throughout the tourism journey. This study proposes a Memorable Digital Tourism Experience (MDTE) framework by identifying the focal actors, recognizing the emotions, and determining the moderating role of sensory stimuli enabled by various novel technologies. At last, several agenda and practical guidelines are proposed on how to operationalize the framework and different methodologies to explore Memorable Digital Tourism Experience.

Along with the changing needs and expectations of tourists, their demands for special interest tourism types have also increased. In this context, tea tourism is accepted as one of the notable tourism types in recent years. For this reason, it is important to examine the behavior of tourists participating in tea tourism and to provide services accordingly. However, studies on the experiences of tourists participating in tea tourism are still insufficient. The purpose of this study is to determine the memorable experience components of tourists participating in tea tourism. In this context, data were collected using semistructured interviews, participant observation, and online tourist comments. According to the findings, the memorable experience components of tourists participating in tea tourism activities are divided into four themes. These themes are: information about tea, tea-related environments, the taste of tea, and interaction. At the conclusion part of the study, some suggestions were made to the marketers, managers, and operators related to tea tourism according to the determined themes.

Contemporary art organizations play a key role in driving cultural tourism, offering visitors memorable experiences. Among the segments of visitors, young adults represent a key target because they are the most interested customers in contemporary arts and they represent 23% of the international travelers. Despite their relevance, little is known about their customer experiences in contemporary arts, and the resulting arts engagement. Although their contemporary arts experiences are expected to generate great benefits in terms of social, ethical, and economical values for the entire society, the relationship between young adults and contemporary arts is typically difficult to understand and, consequently, to facilitate. To address this issue, we run a complex qualitative research project. Distinguishing young adults between those who are familiar with contemporary arts and those who are not, we conduct four research projects by applying two qualitative techniques: the in-depth interview and the Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique (Z-Met). Further, we extend the in-depth interviews to the contemporary arts experts. In total, 70 consumers and 10 experts participate in the research project providing cognitive and emotional insights by exploring barriers and benefits of consumption in contemporary arts. Our findings show that arts engagement is the key concept, linked to three levels of consumer reactions – cognitive, emotional, and social responses – and that it is caused by three antecedents, namely – involvement, sharing, and comprehension. Implications for the actors in the world of contemporary arts and cultural tourism are discussed to obtain higher levels of arts engagement among young adults, and, consequently, their attractiveness.

Films are arguably one of the most influential phenomenon of modern society. They are remarkable and effective means of conveying stories and influencing humans. Films are one of the most important factors that motivate people to travel to a destination. This chapter will explore the phenomenon which is widely known as film tourism and its role in tourist experience. To gain a better understanding of film tourism experiences, this chapter presents key concepts and analyzes existing studies. The analysis investigates important aspects of film tourism experience, including experience satisfaction and storytelling. It tries to highlight how films can influence tourist experiences beyond the travel itself, with a strong emphasis on the role of storytelling and film tourism experience satisfaction. To help readers achieve a clearer and more detailed understanding of the unique and dynamic nature of film tourism experiences, this chapter provides an overview of the tourist experience by conducting a comprehensive literature review on the subject. By doing this, this chapter proposes a new framework of film tourist experience satisfaction while describing the relationship between influential factors such as previous film experiences, motivation to visit a destination, destination expectations, on-site destination experience, and tourist involvement. Finally, conclusions are drawn presenting storytelling as a contemporary approach in the domain of film tourism experiences.

Customer experience is a relevant concept in marketing and tourism research since its correct understanding allows companies to achieve competitive advantage and service providers can reach several outcomes such as customer engagement, loyalty, and customer satisfaction. This chapter aims to analyze one of the main outcomes of the customer experience, the customer satisfaction through online reviews, and using spatial analysis as a tool to incorporate the contextual nature of the customer experience. Thus, our study considers online rating as a measure of customer satisfaction and tries to analyze the impact of actions under the control of the service provider (price and objective quality) and actions under the control of the customer (subjective quality) on customer satisfaction.

With the Spanish hotel industry as a study framework, an empirical study is developed to analyze, through geographically weighted regression techniques, the relationship between price, objective quality and subjective quality, and online ratings given by consumers with a sample of 1870 of geolocated hotels in Spain. The findings show how a premium price, depending on the geolocation, is an indicator for better customer experiences, and they also show that objective quality is the antecedent of customer experience whose positive effect on customer satisfaction is geographically more widespread. Results show contradictory effects of subjective quality, while in some areas subjective quality does not match the product fit of customers, in others it allows hotels to provide more satisfactory experiences.

Though customer experience (CX) is identified as a key research priority, empirically led insight with tourism consumers' resulting emotional attachment (EA) and customer loyalty (CL) remains scarce, particularly during the COVID-19 crisis. Adopting service-dominant logic, this study develops a model that investigates the impact of customer engagement (CE) and customer co-creation (CC) on CX, which consequently effects EA and CL during the COVID-19 crisis in the tourism industry. First, our results suggest that CE and CC positively affect tourism CX. Second, results revealed the CX's significant positive effect on EA and CL. Third, findings confirmed the CE's and CC's indirect impact on EA and CL, as mediated via CX in pandemic situations. Our study offers key implications for destinations to develop tactics in surviving during a pandemic to rebuild tourism.