Pine and Gilmore's Concept of Experience Economy and Its Dimensions: An Empirical Examination in Tourism

Abstract

The growing attention placed on experiences can be regarded as a mega-trend, and has given currency to the proposition that experiences function as a personal source of information for the stories people tell about their lives and are important for their self-perception. This view implies the significance of experiences of individual satisfaction with a given product or visit. To assess this assumption, we have made use of Pine and Gilmore's widely known model, and in so doing have empirically examined the applicability of their concept of an “experience economy” and its four dimensions (education, escapism, esthetics, and entertainment). The necessary data were collected from two tourism contexts, the Ice Music Festival and the Maihaugen Museum. The results indicate that Pine and Gilmore's model can further our understanding of the experience market. However, the findings show that different experiential dimensions influence the visitors' overall satisfaction in different contexts. For instance, while the dimension of escapism has a significant effect on the visitors' overall satisfaction in the case of the Ice Music Festival, the dimension of education significantly influences the visitors' satisfaction at the Maihaugen Museum. The theoretical and practical implications of this study are also discussed.

Keywords:

• Pine and Gilmore
• experiences
• experience economy
• visitor satisfaction

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the Norwegian Research Council for funding the research project Innovation in the Tourism Industry (no. 194527/V10) of which this paper is part. We also thank our research colleagues Hans Holmengen, Christian Krogh, and Terje Slåtten for their contribution to the design of the questionnaire used in the current study.