Creating Cross-Locational Experiential Service Journeys in Tourism

Cultural tourism is a fast-growing segment in the tourism industry and is estimated to be around 40% of the tourist segments globally. After COVID-19, this has come back with renewed force. Regional attractions such as experience centers, museums, event developers, city developers, tourism offices, and so forth need to work together to create enough “reason-to-go” and subsequent “reason-to-stay” experiential qualities in their tourism service value propositions.

Through two larger cultural tourism case projects, we investigate how one can bring ecosystem tourism stakeholders together through codesign tangible methods to ideate on cross-locational experiential service value propositions and what opportunities and difficulties seem to emerge through this. In the first project, three regional museums and a tourism destination office worked together to find shared themes and connected stories. In the second project, seven Second World War museums, three tourism offices, and design developers collaborated to extract three experiential journeys that visitors could follow.

We illustrate how a series of codesign interventions can engage a cross-disciplinary circle of stakeholders and lead to novel insights and shared understandings, establish common ground, and generate ideas with potential. In addition, we analyze the use and effect of introducing codesign methods that can support the development of shared themes and stories attracting visitors and international tourists. Through observations, video recordings, and interaction analysis, we outline both the opportunities and difficulties found in these collaborations.

The opportunities point to the possibilities in providing an attractive offering through a series of connected stories that involve the value chain of travel, food, and accommodation providers and in training the front personnel to guide to the next places. The difficulties point to issues such as the gap between stories as marketing and the stories as they are experienced on location and the difficulty in aligning practices according to a central story line and overall service value proposition across various distances and time.

From the perspective of experiential service design, the results have theoretical implications because a holistic service flows through cross-locational and cross-organizational touchpoints while the practical implications also point to the development of ecosystems of tourism actors working closely together.