Abstract

The study of consumer experiences has been attracting the interest of scholars since the 1980s, when the concept was introduced in the marketing literature for the first time. Since then, consumer experiences have been studied in a number of different settings, such as retail, tourism, and so on. Despite growing interest from scholars, there are still some areas that have been neglected. An example of this is represented by the study of consumer experiences in multi-stakeholder environments where the consumers interact with more than one business to receive and consume a service. In order to partially fill this gap, the present research aims to develop a conceptual framework that will assist in the measurement of consumer experiences in a multi-stakeholder environment. This framework has been developed by taking into account the tourism industry, which is a good example of a multi-stakeholder environment. Indeed, tourists visiting a destination usually consume complementary products and services offered by different providers, such as accommodation providers, transport companies, restaurants, visitor attractions, etc. In order to develop this framework, a review of the marketing and tourism literature has been carried out. In particular, the literature on Service – Dominant Logic has been taken into account with the aim of considering explicitly the co – creation of experiences. In this framework it is postulated that visitors’ satisfaction is a function of the visitors’ perceived value – in – use and the overall experience quality, which takes into account not only the quality of services, but also the social context in which consumption takes place and the extent to which the experience is co – created by businesses and tourists. In this framework the motivations of tourists, their personal values and their involvement in the consumption experience are supposed to play a mediating role in the assessment of the value-in-use. In order to show that the elements identified in this framework are relevant to the tourism industry, we will demonstrate how the framework might be applied to the study of Addiopizzo Travel, an Italian organisation that offers Mafia-free tours of Sicily. The main limitation in this research is the lack of empirical validation of the framework, although an empirical investigation is currently underway. Nonetheless, the framework might be of interest to tourism businesses because it highlights those elements to which particular attention should be paid so that businesses and consumers collaborate in the co – creation of the experience and, consequently, businesses may differentiate themselves from competitors.