Customer experience in tourism: A review of definitions, components, and measurements

The concept of customer experience has received increasing attention in different disciplines. However, the pathway for handling experience has not been clearly set forth due to divergent conceptualizations and insufficient measures of customer experience. This study critically analyzes empirical and conceptual literature on experience, provides a holistic definition of experience, proposes an experience model with four main components (emotional, cognitive, sensorial, and conative), and suggests using a combination of several measures to capture the totality of tourism experience at pre-visit, onsite, and post-visit stages. These suggestions provide important implications for researchers and practitioners by offering new ways to explore customer interaction with tourist products, detect affective and sensory components leading to important consumption outcomes, investigate individual impacts of anticipation, onsite experience, and recall, as well as analyze effectiveness of destination marketing practices.