Welcome to Paradise. Customer experience design and emotional labour on a cruise ship

Abstract

This paper describes the work on board a cruise ship. The purpose is to examine the emotional demands put on workers in the so-called experience industry. A field study was conducted to study how customer experience is created through the management of space, passengers, and emotions. It is argued that the sought-after paradisiac experience is attained by acts of sanitising, and that the perceived freedom of the passengers is mirrored by increased control on the part of the service providers, synthesising Hochschild's notion of emotional labour with Ritzer's sociology of consumption to attain an understanding of the organisation of experiences.