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This chapter explains the role and potential of colour and lighting as two important elements of the service atmosphere in tourism and hospitality service encounters. The chapter first explains the importance of colour and lighting in services from the perspective of customers’ sensory perceptions. Then, the chapter provides examples to demonstrate how psychological/neuro-marketing tools of Eye Tracker and Facial Recognition, Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) and Heart Rate (HR) can be used to understand the role of colour and lighting in customer satisfaction in tourism and hospitality service encounters. Based on this perspective, the study offers recommendations to design service environments in terms of colour and lighting.

This introduction to the volume Atmospheric Turn in Culture and Tourism: Place, Design and Process Impacts on Customer Behaviour, Marketing and Branding (Emerald) positions the atmospheric turn in the context of recent paradigmatic turns such as the linguistic turn, iconic turn, cultural turn, spatial turn, mobility turn and design turn. The specific contribution of the atmospheric turn is its profoundly holistic interest in overarching connections which are perceived with all senses and include both matter and idea. With its 22 chapters, this volume sets out to sharpen the atmospheric gaze and perception in research and beyond.

The aim of this chapter is to offer a conceptual model for tourist experiences in the destination and suggest implications for different stakeholders in creating experiences for tourists.

This conceptual paper explores tourist experiences based on previous literature and through a brief case. A holistic destination experience model is also suggested including the role of DMOs, host community and industry which are considered under the overall experiencescape.

Literature review and analysis of case study suggest that the destination experience can be framed based on the roles of different actors in a destination. Characteristic of the destination and stakeholders do play important roles in involving tourists in experience production.

Findings might provide insights to DMOs and other stakeholders in the destination concerning their roles in creating a holistic positive destination experience for tourists which is crucial for differentiation. Future research might also concentrate on different elements of destination experience and interrelationships of different stakeholders.

Although there are numerous papers on experiences from individual services (e.g., hotels, airlines, restaurants) in the destination, literature on overall stakeholder and creation of holistic destination experience has been overlooked. This chapter offers a theoretical model that would assist policy-makers to design experiences in the destination by looking at the roles of different stakeholders and to improve the competitiveness of the destination.

Purpose – This chapter provides a critical review of the emerging field of consumer experience and experiential marketing.Design/methodology/approach – We review definitions, perspectives, and key research areas on the topics of consumer experience, product and service experiences, off-line and online experiences, as well as consumption and brand experiences. We report empirical findings, seminal studies, and insight into the experience process (e.g., how consumers process experiential attributes, how they process experiences over time, and whether positive and negative experiences can co-occur). We present research on experiential dimensions, experiential themes, and the nature of extraordinary experiences.Value/originality – The chapter provides value by discussing the key measurement and marketing management issues of experiential marketing and discusses the original issue whether it is rational for consumers to include experiences in their decision making.

In this chapter, the authors investigate the experiences of air passengers in the airside setting of commercial airports. Whilst the concept of liminality has found increased interest in tourism studies, only few studies have contextualized the airside experience as a liminal one. We investigate the role of food and beverage (F&B) consumption in this context as well as factors influencing F&B outlet patronage intentions. Using a European non-hub commercial airport as practical unit, we applied a mixed methods single case-study methodology to investigate F&B outlet choice in the airside setting. It becomes evident that perceptions of liminality play an important role in this context. Findings support the claim that the airport environment constitutes a special context, an encapsuled or protected space; not only for passengers, but also for employees alike. Whilst airports have a certain uniformity to regular travelers, infrequent travelers perceive air travel as an extraordinary activity, often paired with a certain uncertainty about related procedures. Evidence suggests that passengers’ emotional states play a key role in consumption decisions. Depending on travel purpose and direction, passengers showed differing consumption behaviors.

Understanding the airport airside area as a liminoid space and using the concept of boundary work for the transition between home and work realms (and back again) thus serves as a suitable frame of reference to help understand the phenomena that were observed and analyzed in this study. F&B consumption can then be understood to support the mental transition between home and work realms. Our findings thus allow linking the passenger clusters’ different consumption behavior to prevailing emotional states in their transgressions between work and home realm in the liminoid airside context.

Retail marketing is in the midst of an evolution. The paradigm is shifting from a product-centric to a consumer-centric focus, with a particular emphasis on understanding how consumers transition from harboring an interest in a product to actually purchasing that product. In response, shopper marketing, and in-store marketing (ISM) in particular, have emerged as important mechanisms to influence shopper behavior in brick & mortar and online retail environments. The academic literature is replete with work on what factors of ISM influence shopper behavior. In this chapter, we categorize prominent streams of findings on ISM into firm, customer, competitor and product characteristics of ISM and examine how the notion of a “store” is evolving from bricks to clicks – namely from physical formats to online shopping experiences. Insights from this chapter will help retailers and store managers identify what their customers respond to within a physical store, how technology is changing the way they can capture information on customers, and how shopper behavior is evolving in response to brick & mortar and online retail environments.