Blending Functional and Emotional Experience with the Experience Economy Model to Understand Resort Experience (original) (raw)

Customer experience in tourism: A review of definitions, components, and measurements

Tourism Management Perspectives

Considered as a more competitive advantage than price, product, or quality, the concept of experience has received increasing attention in different disciplines. However, the pathway for handling experience has not been clearly set forth due to divergent conceptualizations and insufficient measures of customer experience. This study critically analyzes empirical and conceptual literature on experience, provides a holistic definition of experience, proposes an experience model with four main components (emotional, cognitive, sensorial, and conative), and suggests using a combination of several measures to capture the totality of tourism experience at pre-visit, onsite, and post-visit stages. These suggestions provide important implications for researchers and practitioners by offering new ways to explore customer interaction with tourist products, detect affective and sensory components leading to important consumption outcomes, investigate individual impacts of anticipation, onsite experience, and recall, as well as analyze effectiveness of destination marketing practices.

It is all about the emotional state: Managing tourists’ experiences

International Journal of Hospitality Management, 2012

When consuming tourism and leisure services tourists do not only expect professional services but also desire satisfying emotional experiences. To measure satisfaction with emotional experiences traditional service quality and satisfaction research is outdated because those models are based on cognitive components and neglect emotional aspects of customer satisfaction. This research investigates factors determining the service setting that enhance customers' emotional reactions and lead to psychological states and behaviours. Referring to existing theories and empirical evidence in environmental psychology, a research model is developed explaining the relationship between different components of service settings influencing emotional states and satisfaction. Guests' emotions are assessed during service consumption in hotel settings in order to investigate the importance of emotional states. The paper derives three main factors (leisure experience, hardware and human ware) significantly influencing emotional states of customers in high-quality hotels.

Understanding the Consumer Experience: An Exploratory Study of Luxury Hotels

Journal of Hospitality Marketing & Management, 2011

This study explores the consumer experience by examining empirical data collected via a series of in-depth, semistructured interviews with luxury hotel guests. The study findings indicate that hotel guest experiences constitute both physical environment and human interaction dimensions. The research findings suggest that luxury hotel experiences are affected by trip-related factors and personal characteristics of consumers, which impact perceived experience dimensions. The research findings provide specific implications for hotel executives looking for ways to differentiate themselves from their competitors through using experience marketing strategies. In particular, the proposed framework in this study can help practicing managers understand how different factors play a role in consumer experiences. This article contributes to the overall understanding of consumer experience by illuminating the experience perceptions of consumers within the luxury hotel segment.

A Framework for Conceptualizing Customer Experiences Management in the Hotel Industry

Proceedings of the 3rd International Seminar and Conference on Learning Organization (isclo-15), 2016

The hospitality industry has an excellent investment potential. The tourism sector is closely related to the hospitality industry, where the growth of the hospitality industry cannot be separated from the development of the tourism sector, and vice versa. The rapid development of the hospitality industry leads to the emergence of intense competition in attracting guests to stay as well as to take advantage to the facilities available at the hotel. Every hotel aims to provide the customer experience in order to create customer loyalty that have an impact on the level of customer revisit intention. In this paper, we provide an overview of the existing literature on the management of the customer experience and expand the process of creating a customer experience from a managerial perspective. This paper proposes a conceptual model, which discusses management strategies as a determinant factor of the customer experience. In addition, this paper discusses the factors of customer experience management, where the customer attitude and social environment (trend and lifestyle) also influential in shaping the customer experience. Customer experience management is also seen based on strategic perspective with a focus on issues such as how and to what extent an experience-based business can create growth. This study provides the conceptual framework of Customer Experience Management (CEM) as the company's new attempts to understand and manage the customer experience and thus contribute both to academic research and managerial implications.

The Effect of Recreational Experiences and Emotional Gratification on Guest Loyalty in Resorts

Journal of Association of Arab Universities for Tourism and Hospitality (JAAUTH) (Print), 2022

The aim of the study is to examine the effect of guests' recreational experience and emotional gratification at resort hotels on guest loyalty. The aim of the study was achieved by employing an integrative model using SmartPLS. The convenient sampling was used. Four hundred questionnaires form were distributed to resort hotel guests in Sharm El-Sheikh, out of which 305 were returned, and 286 usable ones were statistically handled (71.5% response rate). Mann-Whitney U, Kruskal-Wallis tests, and confirmatory factor analysis were used to analyze the questionnaire forms collected from resort hotel guests. The study results show that most experience factors (entertainment, education, and escapism) significantly affected guest loyalty. Furthermore, three factors of emotional gratification (i.e., fun, the vicarious release of emotions, and social sharing of emotion) were essential for guest loyalty. The study holds crucial academic implications for future scholarly research in tourism and hospitality. Hotel management should hire professional teams and provide different training programs for the animation team. The hotel managers should motivate senior guests to use recreational activities to enhance their experience and increase their loyalty. The animation team should design activities that attract guests.

Developing the tourism experience model

This study introduce the core of a literary critique and rigorous analysis of the meaning and content of experiences. Based on a phenomenological approach, the new experience model contains two axes, Activities and Consciousness that are anchored by the poles of Exploration and Recreation, and Role-Authenticity and Existential Authenticity respectively. The roleauthentic Person side of the scale is characterised by expectations of social roles while the existential authenticity side is characterised by the attitudes that define the Human Being. Recreation is characterised by self-reflexive and self-recreational activities while Exploration marks growth, learning and other-directed activities. Consequences for service-design are highlighted.