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In response to issues and challenges facing the operators of nature-based tours, this study examines snowmobile tours in Svalbard, Norway. Specially, it posits to explore experience providers awareness of the fragile nature in which they are operating and how this awareness is implemented in their offerings. Subsequently, the chapter evaluates experience providers’ attitude of what aspects of the offerings they perceive as attractive to the tourists and the staging of the offerings accordingly. This study utilises interviews with six informants representing three different firms, a participant observation, and text analyses of the offer on the website www.Svalbard.net as the study method. The results show that the informants are aware of the fragile nature and strive to promote a sustainable behaviour during tours. In particular, they focus on informing and teaching the tourists about environmental aspects of the tour through storytelling and staging during the tour. By empowering the tourists through education and involvement they aim to make the tourists change their focus from riding the snowmobile to learning about the fragility of the nature and wildlife. Further, the informants state that the tourists may even become spokesmen for sustainable tourism due to the touring experience received. In conclusion, in a highly fragile environment like the Arctic a rise of motorised tours invites discourses on tourism development. It is pivotal to preserve the nature in a sustainable way while offering attractive tour experiences.

The aim of this chapter is twofold: (i) to explore the issue of experience within the context of the hotel industry and (ii) to analyze the contribution of collaboration between businesses in providing valuable experiences in hotel settings.

Extensive literature reviews have been done on dimensions and outcomes of tourist experiences and on collaboration/business venture’s contribution in providing memorable experiences in the hotel industry. A case study is then used to illustrate how hotel operations are collaborating to provide tourism experience opportunities.

(i) Collaboration between hotel operations makes a significant contribution in providing special guest experiences; (ii) Investment in business ventures is a good investment because it constitutes a potential source of competitive advantage; (iii) A collaborative platform wisely designed creates a series of business benefits.

This study is explorative in nature. Based on a single case study of a business network, the suggestions are indicative rather than conclusive. Thus, more empirical studies and analyses are needed to fully validate the chapter’s suggestions.

The collaborative approach is a requirement for hotel businesses in providing valuable tourism experiences and in overcoming the issues and challenges arising within the context of experiential tourism. This collaboration offers a way of enriching and deepening guests’ experiences, based on endogenous resources and meeting the tourists’ requirements.

Offers insights on tourism providers’ collaborations in offering attractive experience opportunities to their customers.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how both gender and facial attractiveness affect job candidates’ chances of obtaining interviews in China’s dynamic internet job board labor market. It examines how discrimination based on these attributes varies over occupation, location, and firms’ ownership type and size.

The authors carry out a resume audit (correspondence) study. Resumes of fictitious applicants are first carefully crafted to make candidates appear equally productive in terms of their work histories and educational backgrounds. The authors control gender and facial attractiveness. The authors establish the facial attractiveness of candidate photos via an online survey. In total, 24,192 applications are submitted to 12,096 job postings across four occupations in six Chinese cities. Callbacks are carefully tracked and recorded. Discrimination is estimated by calculating the differences in the rates of callbacks for interviews received by individuals whose applications vary only in terms of facial attractiveness and gender. The authors reuse the same resumes repeatedly through this project such that names and photos of each of the candidates: attractive man, attractive woman, unattractive man, and unattractive woman is attached to each resume hundreds of times for each occupation in each city.

The authors find sizable differences in the interview callback rates of attractive and unattractive job candidates. Job candidates with unattractive faces need to put in 33 percent more applications than their attractive counterparts to obtain the same number of interview callbacks. Women are preferred to men in three of the four occupations. Women, on average need put in only 91 percent as many applications as men to obtain the same number of interview callbacks.

The analysis of this paper focusses on only four different occupations. Its scope is also limited to exploring only the first part of the hiring process – obtaining a job interview. Furthermore, its fictitious applicants are all young people, approximately 25 years old. It would be useful to explore how gender and facial attractiveness affect candidates’ chances of landing a job after getting an interview.

This paper contributes to and expands the literature on hiring through China’s internet job boards. It also contributes to the literature on the role of facial attractiveness in hiring.

The purpose of this paper is to identify and classify ecotourism service elements according to their instrumentality to customer satisfaction.

Drawing on the ECOSERV model, the authors conduct further qualitative and quantitative research to find additional dimensions of service quality. Kano’s model and Customer Satisfaction Index are then employed with a sample of 324 ecotourists to categorize these service quality elements.

A new scale of ecotourism service quality is proposed, with the addition of four dimensions: price-quality, interaction with locals, interaction with other customers and relaxation feelings. The paper also confirms the existence of four groups which are classified according to their level of impacts on satisfaction and dissatisfaction: attractive, one-dimensional, must-be and indifferent.

The paper improves the present ecotourism scale and develops an integrated approach to facilitate effective decision making by identifying areas that require greater attention, thus providing practical benefits for eco-site managers. It also hopes to contribute to better understanding about ecotourism services in the context of an Asia country like Vietnam and encourages further research in this area.

The purpose of this paper is to identify, present and analyze the strengths and weaknesses mentioned by leaders when describing how their organization works with creating customer value in commercial experiences. Furthermore, the overall research purpose is to explore the creation of customer value in commercial experiences.

An interview study with eight managers focused on how their organization creates customer value when offering commercial experiences. Results were analyzed with regard to creating customer value, customer involvement and development of new experiences.

A literature study confirms an increasing interest in commercial experiences both financially and because of customer demand. The conducted interview study found several areas of improvement where the greatest potential was in the building of a strong organizational culture based on values to ensure co-creation of customer value between the organization and the customer. Also found to be important were working with customer involvement when co-producing the experience, discovering customer expectations and measuring the results of the delivered customer value.

When it comes to commercial experiences, one of the keys to creating customer value is the element of surprise and delivering the unexpected. This advocates studying the theory of attractive quality, discovering the unspoken needs of the customer.

In view of the intense competition between businesses in the sharing economy and the conventional hospitality industry, this study aims to compare consumers’ private social dining and restaurant dining experiences.

In-depth interviews with 29 private social diners were conducted to yield 10 dining experiential domains, which were then validated using online survey data from 840 diners across four sample groups – local (Hong Kong) private social diners, local (Hong Kong) restaurant diners, overseas private social diners and overseas restaurant diners – to empirically examine a mechanism through which the dining experience influences diners’ psychological and behavioral responses.

The significant differences emerged among the four sample groups in their evaluations of dining experiences. The mediating role of memorability appeared weaker in overseas settings than in local settings.

The findings suggest restaurateurs be creative and open-minded in designing dining experiences that go beyond food-related satisfaction. Destination marketers should also find the findings insightful because they can diversify their catering offerings by differentiating private social dining with conventional restaurants.

The study presents a novel angle on experiential consumption in the sharing economy to focus on food-sharing activities, which is thought to complement the currently skewed research focus in the sharing economy. A theoretically driven mechanism was also validated to explain the experiential differences between conventional restaurants and private social dining.

This study aims to investigate if experiences can create satisfaction, loyalty and place attachment in the context of the budget hotel industry given growing proportion of Gen Y and Gen Z of budget travellers.

This study uses structural equation modelling-partial least squares approach to validate the path model. A total of 168 samples in Indonesia were collected using online consumer survey.

The findings show positive and significant effects of experience on memories, perceived value, satisfaction, loyalty and place attachment among budget hotel travellers.

Some studies have investigated the importance of experiences in budget hotels marketing. This study contributes to this discussion by presenting that multiple dimensions of experience (sensing, feeling, thinking, acting and connecting) are significant drivers of satisfaction, loyalty and place attachment among Gen Y and Gen Z majority budget travellers.

From the findings, the authors suggest budget hotels to provide physical service environment that can enhance the visitor experience while visiting the hotel related to services relating (e.g. cozy room), acting (e.g. instagrammable spots), thinking (e.g. game centre) and sensing experience (e.g. music that soothes the soul) and social interaction (guest-to-staff interaction) that can enhance feeling service (e.g. welcoming staff).

Given the growing proportion of Gen Y and Gen Z among budget travellers and growing occupation of budget hotels, it become more essential to understand how customers perceive the services of budget hotels. This study shows that today customers perceive not only cost but also experiences as important factors that determine their satisfaction, loyalty and attachment towards budget hotels.

Zoos are important urban tourism attractions. The challenge for zoos is finding a balance between attracting visitors and enhancing education and conservation management. This research contributes to a greater understanding of the conservation intentions of zoo visitors and how zoos can emphasise conservation management principles sustainably. This study aims to identify the variables that encourage conservation intentions among visitors to a South African zoo.

A destination-based survey was conducted in 2019 at the Johannesburg Zoo, and 445 questionnaires were administered through convenience sampling.

Exploratory factor analyses identified visitors’ conservation awareness because of zoos (pre-conscious, conscious and unconscious), behavioural intentions (advocating and supporting), motives (engagement, edutainment and escapism) and satisfaction (interaction and facility quality, and service and interpretation quality). The behavioural intentions were the dependent variables. Advocating conservation intentions (ACI) is an active role where zoo visitors feel a strong responsibility towards conservation and encourage others to the conservation cause. Supporting conservation intentions (SCI) relates more to loyalty towards visiting the zoo and subsequently supporting conservation. Stepwise linear regression analyses revealed that enhancing ACI relies on SCI, edutainment, conscious awareness, service and interpretation quality and total spending. However, enhancing SCI relies on ACI, interaction and facility quality and the motive, escapism, while engagement revealed a negative relationship.

The results show that zoos can encourage SCI to ACI by using interactive and entertaining interpretations to teach visitors about the zoo’s mandate and the importance of conservation while balancing their need to escape.

Literary tourism is a developing niche of cultural tourism, which is important to study and for which it is important to define paths. In this chapter, the author makes a framework of literary tourism as a niche, the author presents its definition and a listing of its main products and experiences. The author also sees some examples of resources and products that link literature to digital technologies, checking to what extent they are or may be at the service of the development of literary tourism. After the presentation of these cases, we position our proposal to articulate literary tourism and digital technologies, based on the possibility of improving the visitor’s experience and increasing the attractiveness of literary places with digital applications.