Co-Creating Innovative Tourism Experiences: Towards an Integrative Framework

Abstract

Co-creation centralizes tourists’ role in creating value that results from the interaction with other destination stakeholders and the physical environment. However, the practices and procedures that motivate tourists and tourism service providers to tourism experiences have not been clearly understood. This paper explores the impact of resource utilization and co-creation on tourism experience using the concepts of the resource-based view (RBV) and service-dominant logic (S-D logic) to develop specific hypotheses about the mediating role of co-creation for resource utilization and radical and incremental innovation. The hypotheses were tested using structural equation modeling (SEM) with multi-sample data from tourists and service providers. The neural network model was also employed to predict the relevant ranks of significant predictors of tourism experience. The results show that co-creation significantly influences innovation in the tourism sector. Co-creation is found to mediate the relationship among resource and innovations dimensions. These results could be used to design the co-creative and innovative tourism strategies that could manage and grow tourist experience online because of its effect on brand advocacy and visitor intention.