Memorable Tourism Experiences

What it is

Jong-Hyeong Kim, J. R. Brent Ritchie and Bryan McCormick developed a 24-item scale for memorable tourism experiences and published it in the Journal of Travel Research (online 2010, print 2012). They used an established scale-development process with expert review, and the resulting scale has seven domains.

The domains are hedonism, refreshment, local culture, meaningfulness, knowledge, involvement and novelty. Each names a different kind of thing a traveller may remember about a trip, from simple enjoyment and a sense of renewal to learning something or meeting a new place on its own terms.

In effect

The authors report that the data support the dimensional structure of the scale, its internal consistency and its validity, and they discuss what the scale means for theory and for managers.

For a hotel, the scale offers a vocabulary for what a stay can leave behind. Some domains, refreshment above all, are supplied directly by a stay. Others, such as local culture or knowledge, can be opened up through what a hotel serves, shows and recommends. That use is an interpretation, because the scale was built for tourism experiences in general and not for hotels alone.

The idea sits beside the staging tools described by B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore in The Experience Economy, which treats a staged experience as a distinct economic offering and names a theme, positive cues, memorabilia and the five senses as tools for making it memorable.

What it does not say

The reading behind this page is the published abstract and bibliographic record. It supports the seven domains and the finding that the scale holds together, and no further detail, so item wording, sample sizes and the countries or trips surveyed are not described here.

The scale measures what travellers say they remember. It does not show that a given hotel feature will produce a given memory.

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