Research on tourism experiencescapes: the journey from art to science

ABSTRACT

Researchers have made increasing use of the suffix ‘-scape’ to express the multiple contexts and perspectives that characterize the tourism field. Examples include the terms soundscapes, destinationscapes, landscapes and technoscapes. The present paper explores the application of one such expression – experiencescape – as a potential medium for analyzing various tourism-related experience contexts. The researchers address the persistent adoption of singular investigative perspectives, despite the availability of experimental tracking data that enables more scientific approaches to understanding how experiences are produced, packaged, consumed and staged within environments. To date, there has been no comprehensive review of studies on the evolution and applications of experiencescapes, despite their critical role in forming tourism experiences. This study addresses the gap by discussing the emergence, nature, development and potential of experiencescapes and presents implications for future research. It is found that the experiencescape concept can function both analytically and operationally. It helps to understand, investigate and interpret diverse tourism experiences and provides a basis for developing new or improved experiences.

KEYWORDS:

• Experiencescape
• tourist experience
• scape
• heritage
• intangible

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Zhaoyu Chen http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8023-0516

Wantanee Suntikul http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3834-850X

Brian King http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5300-5564