Monitoring the Quality of Tourism Experience

DOI

10.2991/atf-16.2016.44How to use a DOI?

Keywords

quality, tourism experience, tourism destination, satisfaction.

Abstract

The new economic era - the experience economy - that we entered in the XXI century is challenging the overall tourism industry and destinations to respond to visitor expectations in a radically different way, demanding a new vision on what is truly being delivered to them. Within the current era, tourism businesses and destinations, in order to thrive and compete globally, are bound to recognize that experience, not goods or services, are what motivates visitors to travel, repeat visits to the destinations and recommend it to friends and relatives. Being so, a research agenda for tourism development and quality should place at its centre the nature of tourist experience and meanings of quality tourist experience from the stakeholders point of view, so that the industry actors can take joint action supported by in-depth knowledge of meanings attached to experience. With few exceptions, in tourism related literature, quality tourism experience has been largely overlooked. However, tourist experience and tourism experience have been discussed by Clawson [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9] among others. Clawson[1] wrote about recreation experience; Boorstin[2] discoursed on authenticity in tourist experience; Cohen[3], [4] studied the phenomenological tourist experience frames; MacCannell's[5] presented contemporaneous writings on tourist experience and authenticity. Pearce and Caltabiano[7] further extended consideration of traveller and tourist experience and authenticity with connections to motivations. Smith [6], Smith and Brent [8] addressed the interaction of host and guest in travel experience. Ryan [9] focused particularly on the 'tourist experience'. Tourism and tourist experience past research have also focused on temporary and activity-based relationships [1] and some only on activity [10], [11]. Borrie and Birzell[12] presented four ways used to understand tourist and tourism experience. Those four ways include (1) meanings-based[13], (2) benefits, (3) satisfaction[14], and (4) experience based means[4], [15]. Urry[16] introduced the notion of 'gaze' into considerations of tourist experience albeit 'his gazes' were challenged by Perkins and Thorns[17]. Although there has been considerable theoretical thinking on the subject, not much empirical research is available. One reason for this to happen is the multidimensional, complex and highly diversified nature of the tourist experience. Another reason is related to the fact that supporting constructs, namely satisfaction, quality and value, continue relatively ambiguous and are not always part of an integrated vision and consistent research. And yet, understanding of major and relevant dimensions of the tourist experience are of utmost importance to construct operationalization for effective experience management at destination level. The article proposes an integrated vision on how to monitor the quality of tourism in a mass tourism coastal destination - the Algarve (Portugal). W

Copyright

© 2016, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Julio Mendes
AU  - Manuela Guerreiro
PY  - 2016/05
DA  - 2016/05
TI  - Monitoring the Quality of Tourism Experience
BT  - Proceedings of the Asia Tourism Forum 2016 - the 12th Biennial Conference of Hospitality and Tourism Industry in Asia
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 300
EP  - 310
SN  - 2352-5428
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/atf-16.2016.44
DO  - 10.2991/atf-16.2016.44
ID  - Mendes2016/05
ER  -