Embracing the paradox of customer experiences in the hospitality and tourism industry

Abstract

This paper aims to re‐evaluate the customer experience literature in the hospitality and tourism (H&T) domain by employing a paradox lens and constructing a model for future research direction and practitioners. Using two co‐citation analysis methods—a hierarchical cluster analysis and a multidimensional scaling analysis—to investigate 312 customer experience papers from the leading H&T journals with 22.124 citations over the 44‐year period (1987–2021), we identified five knowledge foundations that have made up the intellectual structure of customer experience in H&T: experiential consumption, authenticity, memorability, place branding, and service. This result reveals the dualistic representations of the paradoxical character of customer experience including authentic/fantastical, structured/unstructured, branded/ecological, and bubbled/exposed. Based on this finding, this study developed a framework for scholars and marketers to reveal different approaches to managing the tensions between paradoxes.

Experience management in hospitality and tourism: reflections and implications for future research

“…Consequently, few studies take an approach that experiences can also emerge spontaneously because cocreation and codestruction processes taking place simultaneously among various actors of a service ecosystem determine the lived idiosyncratic experience of every actor. In fact, Zha et al (2023) introduced a model for CEM in H&T grounded in the paradox management theory. While managing the customer journey to address anticipated individuals' feelings and fantasies, one should also consider existential (activity-based) authenticity, acknowledging the sociocultural background individuals bring to the experience, beyond object-related authenticity.…”