This special edition of the Journal is created from a number of articles written for the Extraordinary Experiences conference held

at Bournemouth University, 3–4 September 2007, organised under the leadership of Dr Alan Fyall of Bournemouth University, in association with Breda University of Applied Sciences. This gathering brought together 80 academics and practitioners from 18 countries to present their research into the management of the consumer experience in hospitality, leisure, sport, tourism, retail and events. Those whose work discussed aspects of the consumer experience in tourism contexts or its application to areas such as des-tination and attraction marketing, were invited to submit papers for this special edition. The papers that appear here have been selected after a process of blind peer review.

The title Extraordinary Experiences was chosen because it held associations for both of the two distinct but complementary strands, manage-rial and behavioural in orientation, that can be found in the literature. Experiences can be extraordinary because they stand out against other competing tourism offers, or more pro-foundly, in the sense used by Abrahams (1981), because they hold a special meaning for the tourist, a rite of passage or a moment of per-sonal development. The managerial perspec-tive is most famously advanced by Pine and Gilmore’s The Experience Economy (1999), a text frequently mentioned in the conference. This argues that in mature markets where products are similar, services quality is taken for granted and the internet reduces fl ights and accommo-dation to commodities bought on price alone, the creation of unique, memorable experiences

is the most effective strategy to gain a lasting competitive advantage. This, they claim, is done by putting on a show for your customers, by treating ‘work as theatre and every business a stage’. At the conference, Joe Goldblatt exemplifi ed this approach, explaining how, by ‘Playing the Five Senses’, we could better manage expectations, experiences and percep-tions and by doing so, ensure that we get an ROE — return on event. Diane Nijs and Koert de Jager from Breda developed this into a stra-tegic approach, termed ‘imagineering’, which seeks to create value and innovation based on an understanding of the consumer experience. This was well illustrated by a presentation from David Hoare, who outlined experience management in practice at Hall & Woodhouse, a chain of public houses, endorsing the importance of the setting for the hospitality experience.

In this edition, the extent to which tourist attractions should simply ‘put on a show’ is discussed by McIntyre in the context of a local museum and art gallery. His research found that adults wanted space to immerse them-selves in the subjects of the museum and gallery. They would then be able to use their own imagination to explore the collection and think about how the artefacts were used in their original context. This is in contrast to the pressure to create entertainment, what Pine and Gilmore (1999) would call ‘edutainment’. The research found that adults and young adults saw the use of technology as a way of entertaining children and only as a short-term tactic for the overall experience. Bringing the past ‘alive’ was seen as the most important aspect rather than technology for its own sake.

This example underlines the need to base so-called experience management on a real understanding of what the desired consumer experience is. The second strand of tourism

Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF TOURISM RESEARCHInt. J. Tourism Res. 11, 107–109 (2009)Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/jtr.722

Extraordinary Experiences in Tourism: Introduction to the Special Edition

*Correspondence to: M. Morgan, School of Services Management, Bournemouth University, Fern Barrow, Poole BH12 5BB, UK.E-mail: mmorgan@bournemouth.ac.uk

108 Jackson et al.

Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Int. J. Tourism Res. 11, 107–109 (2009) DOI: 10.1002/jtr

experience research, and the one that predomi-nates in the conference papers and these articles, seeks to achieve this understanding through insights from the psychology, sociol-ogy anthropology and consumer behaviour literatures.

An overview of the development of experi-ence literature over the last thirty years can be found in the fi rst paper, Ritchie and Hudson’s ‘Understanding and meeting the challenges of consumer/tourist experience research’. This provides us with a useful annotated explora-tion of some of the key contributions to the development of theoretical thinking and empirical research. From a review of a huge variety of literature, they have managed to condense for the journal some of their key fi nd-ings through six key themes or streams: the fundamentals of the experience; experience-seeking behaviours; methodologies used in experience research; the nature of specifi c tourism experiences; managerial issues in the design and delivery of experiences and the evolutionary trail of experience thinking. The review of the literature highlights the diffi culty of researching experience because of the differ-ent terms and foci identifi ed, from satisfaction and quality to memorable and extraordinary.

Ritchie and Hudson recognise that there has been a shift to more qualitative methodologies and methods and they helpfully identify examples of both qualitative and quantita-tive research undertaken. Both approaches are illustrated in this special edition. Laing and Crouch’s ‘Dreams, myths and desire at the frontier: metaphors and imagery behind an extraordinary travel experience.’ focuses on one particular type of tourist, the adventurer, though a narrative approach to the metaphors and imagery used to describe the journey. They recognise that myths work at an emo-tional and therefore, perhaps, at a deeper level. As with other papers in this special edition, Laing and Crouch are trying to get at not only how and why people travel but what meanings they bestow upon those experiences. They explain how the metaphors and imagery used to describe the experiences could be utilised in future marketing exercises and to further develop the theatrical analogy used by previ-ous commentators. They conclude these jour-neys are metempsychotic — where the tourist

takes on the persona of a signifi cant other or group, as a role model for a particular repeated journey which may serve as inspiration for a new generation of travellers.

A different qualitative approach to similar themes is taken by White and White in their article, ‘The comfort of strangers: tourists in the Australian outback.’ In this research they identify the importance of the companionship of strangers whilst travelling in unknown terri-tory. ‘Association is . . . integral to the process of giving meaning to the travel experience’. Interactions occur in different places and spaces which of themselves have meaning. As in McIntyre’s article immersion (but this time in the natural landscape) is important in the con-struction of the experience which is directly related the active construction of the self.

While tourism managers and marketers may gain useful insights from this kind of in-depth research into individual travellers, there is also a need for methods that are more directly applicable to specifi c management contexts. Brunner and Sperdin’s paper demonstrates an experience-quality management model which focuses on the emotional triggers and responses to hospitality experiences rather than the cog-nitive information processing which has been the traditional consumer behaviour approach to service quality. The model aims to fi nd out what guests feel about the service rather than what they know about it. They have based this model on Csikzentmihalyi’s ESM (experience sampling method) and have taken a quantita-tive approach because they believe that the measurement of emotions should be done directly or immediately after the consumption of a service, rather than recalled later through interviews.

Mak’s paper on ‘Health or Self-Indulgence: motivations and characteristics of spa-goers’ also uses quantitative analysis to reveal and rank the desired experiences of the visitors.

The remaining papers explore the extent to which the theoretical insights discussed in this edition have begun to infl uence tourism management in practice. Morgan, Elbe and de Esteban Curiel’s ‘Has the experience economy arrived yet?’ discusses the implications of both the consumer and managerial perspectives in the tourism experience literature for those involved in the practicalities of destination

Introduction 109

Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Int. J. Tourism Res. 11, 107–109 (2009) DOI: 10.1002/jtr

management. The paper tries to conceptualise the key elements of the experience approach as being a view of consumer behaviour that stresses the emotional, aspirational and par-ticipative over the functional and rational; an approach to services management through theatrical metaphors of staging, casting and performance; and strategies that see the deliv-ery, or co-creation, of unique and memorable experiences as a source of competitive advan-tage. It investigates the extent to which these have been accepted and acted upon by destina-tion managers, using interviews in three con-trasting destinations.

Hudson and Ritchie’s ‘Branding a memora-ble destination experience: the case of “Brand Canada,” ’ illustrates how an experienced-based strategy has been adopted for the whole country by the Canadian Tourism Commis-sion. They do this in the context of experiential marketing and other case studies from around the globe. The case study enables the reader to evaluate the extent to which a campaign based on the tourist experience can capture the poten-tial customers attention and provide a more urgent and compelling reason to visit than one based on destination features.

The papers cover research in Australia, Austria, Germany, Italy, England, Sweden, Spain and Hong Kong, giving not only an international cross-cultural perspective, but also access to non-English language literature and resources (albeit second-hand). The papers in this special edition also add to our knowledge of specifi c experience contexts, from hotels, museums & galleries, resorts and national destinations to frontiers and the outback. A number of themes, or regular aspects of the experience, are identifi ed throughout the papers, that of the environ-ment or setting, the people (the individual, tourists, residents, providers) and that magic mixture of all hardware, software and human-ware (Brunner-Sperdin and Peters) that enables people to immerse themselves and create (or imagine) the experiences that they want. The

challenge throughout this special edition is the struggle to bring together the consumer and managerial perspectives, i.e., to understand in order to best manage the tourist experience. What is demonstrated through these examples of research is that, ultimately, managers can only facilitate or provide a setting for experi-ences, which are created by the tourists themselves.

At the conference the rather evangelical and triumphalist tone of some of the experience management school was attacked in the closing presentation from Brian Wheeler as ‘vague, vogue and vacuous’. He questioned whether all the ‘new’ interest in experiences was just a case of ‘the Emperor’s new clothes’. We hope that readers of this special edition will be better able to judge the importance to tourism man-agement of understanding and enhancing the visitor experience, and to appreciate some of the depth and variety of scholarly research being undertaken in this fi eld.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

The editors would like to thank all who reviewed the papers for this edition, and especially Dr Alan Fyall for his advice and guidance.

REFERENCES

Abrahams RD. 1981. Ordinary and extraordinary experiences. In The Anthropology of Experience, Turner V (ed.). University of Illinois Press: Chicago; 45–72.

Pine BJ, Gilmore JH. 1999. The Experience Economy: Work is Theatre and Every Business is a Stage. HBS Press: Boston.

Pine BJ, Gilmore JH. 2007. Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want. HBS Press: Boston.

Caroline Jackson, Michael Morgan and Nigel Hemmington

Guest editorsSchool of Services Management,

Bournemouth University, UK