ANOTHER LOOK AT THE HERITAGE TOURISM EXPERIENCE

摘要

In the literature, tourism experience is the subjective mental state felt by tourists during a tourism service encounter, and thus has an important influence on their evaluations of and satisfaction with the service received (Otto & Ritchie, 1996), as well as subsequent loyalty (Zomerdijk & Voss, 2010). Heritage tourism, like other leisure and tourism activities, is largely viewed as a process of experiential consumption (Chen & Chen, 2010), and the management of tourist experience is always a priority in the heritage tourism context (Dong & Siu, in press). Although recent studies have examined tourism experience and its measurement (Hosany & Gilbert, 2012; Kim, Ritchie, & McCormick, 2012), a closer investigation into the experiential nature of tourism services, such as experiential quality and experiential value, is still lacking in the literature. In particular, the experiential nature of tourism services in most previous studies is examined from the quality aspect, rather than from the value one, with the latter being more closely related with experiential consumption. The experiential quality of tourism services is subjective, while service quality is objective (Otto & Ritchie, 1996).