A Practical Guide to Managing Tourist Experiences

This book provides students with a concise and practical guide that presents key understandings of the tourist experience and provides strategic guidance on how to develop an impactful and memorable experience.

Chapters follow the path of the tourist journey, firstly exploring consumer behaviour, the decision-making process and the tourist’s need for escape, and providing insights into the strategic implications of consumer behaviour and the concept of immersion in tourism. Subsequent chapters look at the impact of experiences; consider trends in tourism experience such as wellness, sustainability, authenticity and fantasy; and provide experience design models. The final chapter offers a unique ten-step approach to designing impactful and memorable tourist experiences. Highly practical and engaging, this book is packed full of case studies and examples, from forest bathing in Finland to truffle hunting in Italy, as well as tools and exercises to guide the design process.

This book offers students a full understanding of how the experience is lived from the tourist perspective, how tourism providers can manage that process and how to develop successful experimental marketing interventions. This is essential reading for all tourism students and future tourism managers.

Isabelle Frochot has been a course leader since 2000 of a Master in Tourism Destination Management at the University Savoie Mont Blanc and is now the director of studies for its six Masters. She is currently supervising four PhD students. Isabelle has recently been welcomed back onto the TTRA Europe Board, and will certainly be actively involved in this association for years to come. Isabelle specializes in the study of tourist behaviour and started her research career by investigating psychographic segmentation in heritage management, rural tourism and service quality scales with the creation of HISTOQUAL. Isabelle completed her PhD at Manchester Metropolitan University and then worked as a lecturer at the Scottish Agricultural College and the Scottish Hotel School (Strathclyde University, Scotland) for five years. Since returning to France in 2000, Isabelle has moved her research focus to mountain tourism, concentrating on the analysis of the consumer experience (experience sequencing, nesting dynamics in a holiday context, immersion, and disconnection/reconnection processes in tourism consumption). She has recently been involved in projects investigating the conceptual framework of escapism, the role and evolution of memory in tourism experiences and the place of videos as a new tool in qualitative research.