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

Abstract

This article contributes to the conceptual debate on tourist experiences. The article offers an overview of the developments within the field of consumer or consumption experience with stress on “consumer culture theory” (CCT) and discusses how this research could contribute to alternative and complementary ideas for conceptualizing tourist experiences as presented in tourism literature. Within the latter, the home/strangerhood-perspective and 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 now comprehensive focus on experiences within consumer research, and elucidates the emergence of and the contributions from two main approaches within CCT, the individual and the sociocultural approach. The authors suggest that tourist experience is about how meaning is created and argue that meaning creation is constituted by a mixed configuration of individual, social, and cultural meaning. It is finally suggested that the CCT research can offer significant contributions to extend the understanding of tourists' movements in time and space between different experience arenas both in an ontological and in an epistemological sense.