The co-creation tourism experience

Abstract

Numerous books have been written lately about the fundamental changes in society, with titles like the ‘attention economy’, ‘dream society’, ’market of emotions’, ‘the age of access’, the ‘support economy’, the ‘experience economy’, etc. (see Cornelis (1999), Davenport and Beck (2001), Florida (2002),Jensen (1999), Nijs and Peters (2002), Piët (2004), Pine and Gilmore (1999), Prahalad and Ramaswamy (2004), Rifkin (2000), Ter Borg (2003), Zuboff (2002), and more). The common factor they share is that society’s system of social ruling is changing to make way for one driven by communicative self steering (Cornelis 1988). The traditional top down approach makes way for dialogues between equal partners. As a result, customers are gaining more power and control. Competition, however, is from a long time ago based on product and company centric led innovations to increase product variety or to increase uniqueness. This is being taken over by the co-creation experience as a basis for value and as the future of innovation, according to Prahalad and Ramaswamy (2004). The authors (2003) already see glimpses of the co-creation and expansion of such experience environments in a variety of realms. Strangly enough, the biggest experience generator, i.e., tourism, is not yet one of them. It falls behind both in applications as well as in fundamental research. For many people in the developed world, time spent on leisure and tourism has become an essential part of their quality of life (Csikszentmihalyi and Hunter 2003). Urry speaks of the ‘culture of tourism’ (1990). Especially during free time people express their quest for ever more unique experiences reflecting their own personal stories (Binkhorst 2002, 2005a, 2005b). The aim of this paper is to link tourism studies with other fields in order to develop an innovative perspective on tourism. This new perspective allows value to increase, not only for tourists but also for other stakeholders involved in tourism experience environments. In order to understand tourism and furthermore to develop tourism, the main source for input is hidden in each human being who eventually becomes a tourist or who, from one of his experience environments, comes into contact with tourism. A tourism network approach facilitates the inclusion of anyone and anything eventually involved in the (co-) creation of tourism experiences, each of them operating from different time spatial contexts.