How Can Consumer Research Contribute to Increased Understanding of Tourist Experiences? A Conceptual Review

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article contributes to the conceptual debate on tourist experiences. Thearticle offers an overview of the developments within the field of consumer or consumptionexperience with stress on “consumer culture theory” (CCT) and discusses how this researchcould contribute to alternative and complementary ideas for conceptualizing touristexperiences as presented in tourism literature. Within the latter, the home/strangerhoodperspectiveand the perspective of traveling in time and space are referred to in particular.The article describes how movements in the early 1980s have been imperative for the nowcomprehensive focus on experiences within consumer research, and elucidates the emergenceof and the contributions from two main approaches within CCT, the individual and thesociocultural approach. The authors suggest that tourist experience is about how meaning iscreated and argue that meaning creation is constituted by a mixed configuration ofindividual, social, and cultural meaning. It is finally suggested that the CCT research canoffer significant contributions to extend the understanding of tourists’ movements in time andspace between different experience arenas both in an ontological and in an epistemologicalsense.