'Designing Tourism Experiences: A Conceptual Framework for the Process of Experience Concept Development.'

This research proposes to develop a model of the process by which tourism organisations can effectively articulate an experience concept. The research proposes that experience concept articulation is the first step in the competitive advantage seeking process of service innovation through experience development, which is widely acknowledged as leading to greater market differentiation and increased customer value (Pine and Gilmore, 1999: ITIC, 2006). Voss (2005, 2007) asserts that many service organisations have sought to draw on experiences to generate new value in several dimensions however he stresses the importance of careful experience design and emphasises the complexity of developing experiential services. Larsen and Mossberg (2007) explain how at the core of most tourists activity is the desire for various experiences, and he maintains that greater research into the nature and antecedents of a tourism experience is required.

The very character and structure of the tourism sector presents both developmental and operational issues to tourism practitioners attempting to enhance existing services or to develop new services (Hjalager, 2002). Edgell (2005) cited in Page (2007) presents a number of significant issues affecting world tourism, of which the development of high quality tourism experiences for increasingly sophisticated and discerning tourists is of primary importance. It is the objective of this study to address the challenge of developing and designing high quality tourism experiences, by building a clearer understanding of the process by which tourism experience concepts are developed and to communicate best practice in tourism experience design.