Co-creation of tourism experience: attention, involvement and memorability

In recent years, facilitation of memorable tourism experiences has been claimed strategic in the context of the competitive development of tourism businesses and destinations. At the same time, trends in consumer behaviour are consistently showing the tourists’ willingness to become more involved in the design, production and consumption of their experiences by getting closer to producers and other consumers, and also their growing desire of enhancing opportunities to extract from hedonic consumption positive enduring memories. As extant literature on tourism experience continues to stress the role of the tourist as co-creator of the experience, research on cocreation from the tourist perspective is still scarce. Accordingly, this thesis examines co-creation adopting the tourist point of view and explores psychological processes emerging from it. In this work, co-creation is described as the tourist’s experience of actively participating and interacting on-site, and its direct and indirect influence on attention, involvement and memorability is empirically examined in the context of animal-based experiences at Zoomarine Park, Algarve, Portugal. This thesis is composed of three independent though interrelated studies. The first study is conceptual and reviews literature on co-creation in tourism, aiming at highlighting prior contributions to conceptualization, and how these help building up a definition of co-creation of use in empirical research. The second study explores this definition and applies it in a qualitative research which relates on-site co-creation with attention and memorability, through analysis of 22 interviews conducted to tourists following an experience. The last study of this thesis is based on a quantitative approach and design and examines the relationship between tourist on-site co-creation, attention, involvement and memorability using a model which is tested through Structural Equation Modelling (SEM). With data obtained from 385 tourists participating in two experiences characterized by different levels of co-creation, a connection was found between co-creation and experience memorability through the mediating effects of attention and involvement. The thesis main findings include the following: (i) the growing interest observed in the study of co-creation in the field of tourism, which is consequently leading to more investigation being done, diversifying approaches, contexts and methods employed; (ii) the fairly extended agreement among researchers on characterizing co-creation, from the tourist point of view, through the concepts of active participation and interaction; and (iii) the tourists’ perception of a relation between co-creation, attention and experience memorability; also quantitatively substantiated findings comprise: (iv) the direct effect of co-creation on tourist attention and involvement; (v) the indirect effect of co-creation on the memorability of the experience; (vi) the effect of the level of cocreation on the level of attention, involvement and memorability, leading to the conclusion that the more co-creative is the tourist experience, the more attentive and involved the tourist will be with events, and therefore the more memorable the tourist experience is expected to be. Based on the preceding findings, contributions to theory on co-creation in tourism are identified and clarified, and implications to experience management and design are discussed.