Toward an identification of elements contributing to satisfaction with the tourism experience

The tourism offering is usually described as an amalgam of touristic products and services available on one site and is considered in the literature as a combination of consumption experiences that involve both private and public actors. The tourism experience is thus characterized by many interactions with the physical and human environment valued by tourists and leading to satisfaction. From a management viewpoint, the main challenge is to understand the satisfactory and dissatisfactory elements of the tourism experience in order to design and deliver a memorable one likely to result in positive post-consumption reactions. Using the critical incident technique, the authors collected 216 incidents in order to reveal the salient factors on which tourists forge their evaluations and base their satisfaction. This research sought to investigate the major driving factors determining tourist satisfaction and dissatisfaction, taking into account all elements related to a touristic stay and partially neglected to date in the tourism literature. A typology of elements contributing to satisfaction with the tourism experience is proposed. The results indicate that a broader, holistic view of tourism experience is needed. They also suggest that marketers should focus on elements leading to satisfaction and dissatisfaction. Moreover, besides the traditional classification categories based on service attributes and the type of providers, the results highlight human factors as a new important category of elements influencing satisfaction. Implications for tourism destination managers and services managers are then discussed.