Co-creating emotional value in a guided tour experience: the interplay among guide’s emotional labour and tourists’ emotional intelligence and participation

The aim of this research is to delineate the co-creation of emotional value in a guided tour experience from a customer-dominant logic perspective by exploring the interactions among tour guides’ emotional labour, tourists’ emotional intelligence and emotional participation. Two theoretically plausible roles of tourists’ emotional intelligence are examined: (1) antecedent of emotional participation and (2) moderator of the relationship between guide’s emotional labour and tourists’ emotional participation. The structural models were tested on a sample of 270 tourists participating in a guided tour in Valencia, a city on the eastern Mediterranean coast of Spain. The results confirmed the expected emotional contagion effect between tour guide’s emotional labour and tour members’ emotional participation. The research also provided empirical evidence of the direct impact of tourists’ emotional intelligence on emotional participation, thus supporting the antecedent role of the construct and not its theorized moderating effect. The findings emphasize the dyadic nature of the emotional value creation in a guided tour experience and challenge the traditional view that its success is only dependent on the service provider’s (i.e. tour guide) emotional skills.