The Eco-Experience as a Complementary Offer to Coastal Product in a Mass Tourism Destination

The new economic era “the experience economy” that we entered in the twenty-first century is challenging the overall tourism industry and destinations to respond to visitor expectations in a radically different way, demanding a new vision on what is truly being delivered to them. Within the current era, tourism businesses and destinations, in order to thrive and compete globally, are bound to recognize that experiences, not goods or services, are what motivate visitors to travel, repeat visits to the destination, and recommend it to friends and relatives. Being so, a research agenda for tourism development and quality should place at its center the nature of tourist experiences and meanings of quality tourist experiences from the stakeholders point of view, so that the industry actors can take joint action supported by in-depth knowledge of meanings attached to experiences. Researchers face many challenges and obstacles in this particular area of investigation due to difficulties inherent complexity of experience-related issues, as an effect of the dynamic, subjective, emotional and in construct definition and consensus, the opportunity for multiple theoretical approaches, as well as the contextual nature of the experience itself. In sum, the construct operationalization both for the purpose of understanding the phenomenon and for practical benefits to the industry is the main challenge. There is however a strong need for these obstacles to be tackled and overcome through this research project designed to contribute to construct definition and clarification, in consistence with an integrated approach conceived to frame the complexity of quality tourist experiences.