Blending Functional and Emotional Experience with the Experience Economy Model to Understand Resort Experience

Abstract

Recently, research on customer experience has been extensively conducted in the hospitality and tourism field such as the resort industry. It is widely known that a pleasant and memorable experience during guests’ stay will encourage favourable attitude from the guests. Prior research has revealed that guests who stay in a resort look for accommodation, dining, and cultural experiences as well as interaction with its external environment (e.g. recreational activities). This suggests the importance of functional and emotional experience, and experiential consumption theories. This article proposes an integration of functional and emotional experience with the experience economy model as a dimension of customer experience, in order to further understand customers’ resort experience. This proposed dimension builds and improves upon the evolving theory in experiential consumption with a comprehensive approach that may be applied to the hospitality and tourism industry. Hence, this will give a clearer direction to the hospitality and tourism industry, as guidance for its guest managers.