Experiential tourism standards: the perceptions of rural tourism providers

This paper presents the results of an exploratory study of the perceptions of a group of rural Kansas tourism providers to a set of twenty experiential tourism standards. The results of the exploratory study are examined and discussed in the context of current experiential tourism literature and implications for future research are discussed. Finally, implications for management practice are reviewed and discussed. Introduction In June 2001, the phrase, “experiential tourism,” was used to describe a “rapidly emerging trend” in a tourism industry report in Australia [1]. The report distinguished the ‘new’ tourism of the 1990s from ‘mass’ tourism of the 1980s. This decade of the 1990s “witnessed the evolution of a more experience-based domestic traveler,” the report continued, especially with respect to self-drive visitors and to a lesser extent, organized tours. Through the late 1990s and into the new millennium, then, “experiential tourism” has begun to appear regularly in tourism practitioner literature around the world [2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. Simultaneously, in the United States, the work of Pine and Gilmore [7, 8, 9] on “The Experience Economy” was permeating many facets of the service industry, including entertainment attractions, hospitality venues and customer services of all kinds. Here is a useful quote from their recent work: “And don’t stop at just one experience – you should create a series of related experiences that flow one from another, creating demand up and down at every level, both generating new forms of revenue and driving