Keywords

1 Introduction

The term “creative tourism” refers to a new generation of tourism [1] and has been posed as an extension of “cultural tourism” [2, 3]. UNESCO [1] advocated that creative tourism should be linked to the living culture of a location and aim to drive local enterprises that offer cultural experiences. Smith [4] argued that development of the creative industries and accompanying experiential forms of tourism can lead to exciting new products.

Several studies have examined the value of creative tourism in promoting local skills, expertise, and traditional culture [3, 5]. Active tourists are especially important for successful creative tourism because they must participate in cultural activities such as painting, photography, crafts, dancing, and cookery [4]. To meet the ever-changing interests of tourists, tourism-related enterprises must be aware and proud of their strengths, and they should be willing to share experiences through creative products and services. Therefore, it is essential to understand how creative experiences for creative tourism are formed.

The concept of an experience economy is as an emerging paradigm encompassing a variety of industries, including the tourism and hospitality sectors [6, 7]. The experience economy has been increasingly applied as a framework for the arts, culture, and creative industries, including music, performing arts, and cultural festivals [8]. Tourism is seen as the biggest producer of experiences [9], wherein values can be created through various elements within tourism related services and products [10]. Pine II and Gilmore [11] proposed that experience industries use services as a stage and products as props to spur individual consumers’ participation. Experience designers provide not only products or services but also experiences and memories elicited by the product or service.

In the tourism literature, tourist experience has been emphasized as an essential creator of competition in the tourism industry [12,13,14,15]. Several studies have explored and evaluated tourism experiences by using service design approaches and tools [14,15,16,17,18]. For example, Tussyadiah [14] developed a theoretical foundation for experience design in tourism and proposed a human-oriented, iterative designing process for producing a holistic experience concept. The concept of creativity in creative tourism has been discussed, and the factors resulting in creative experiences have been developed [19, 20]. However, few studies have examined the creative experience of designing experiential products or services in creative tourism. On the basis of the aforementioned studies, tool for designing tourist experiences and methods emerging from different disciplines should be integrated to provide a framework for experiential service design in creative tourism.

The following section provides a brief review of the literature on creative tourism, service design, and tourism experience. In the next section, a theoretical model is proposed through multiple case studies of creative tourism in Taiwan. Last, the theoretical findings and limitations of the study and future directions for research are discussed. This study is important for both theory and practice. The purpose of this paper is to capture the elements affecting the tourists’ experiences in creative tourism. Regarding tourists’ views, these factors are analyzed and discussed in order to establish a framework for designing experiential products and services in creative tourism.

2 Theoretical Background

2.1 Creative Tourism

Creative tourism is an extension of cultural tourism that reflects a changing demand in tourism style [2, 3]. Creative tourism has been defined by UNESCO [1] as “travel directed toward an engaged and authentic experience, with participative learning in the arts, heritage, or special character of a place, and it provides a connection with those who reside in this place and create this living culture”. People are increasingly interested in cultural activities (e.g. painting, photography, crafts, dancing, cookery, pottery, and music), and they hope to develop their creative potential through creative tourism [4, 21].

Recent studies have explored the essence of creative experiences in creative tourism from the perspective of tourists. Tan et al. [20] proposed that outer interactions and inner reflections are the key factors for modeling tourists’ creative experiences. Entrepreneurs should understand the key factors to tourists’ experiences in creative tourism and devise appropriate design methods to facilitate a unique tourism experience. An empirical study by Ali, Ryu, and Hussain [22] examined the effect of creative tourists’ experiences on their memories, satisfaction, and behavioral intentions. The results demonstrated the importance of overall experience in forming creative tourists’ memories, satisfaction, and behavioral intentions. Therefore, creative tourism enterprises must offer tourists opportunities to develop their creativity through active participation in various activities.

2.2 Tourism Experience

In the design of experiences, Pine II and Gilmore [11] proposed that encompassing more realms of the experience economy increases the likelihood of producing an experience “sweet spot,” with the likelihood highest if an experience incorporates all four realms. They proposed five steps to experience design: (1) defining the theme, (2) blending the experience with positive cues, (3) eliminating negative cues, (4) associating with memorability, and (5) integrating sensory stimulation. These steps indicate that even after determining the realm of an experience, experiential cues and sensory stimulation must be employed to enhance customer experience.

Recent research on tourism has examined creating and managing tourism experiences through design research or methods [14,15,16,17,18]. Stickdorn and Frischhut [16] proposed that tourism experiences can be facilitated through peak tourism experiences, supporting consumer experiences, and daily routine experiences. Supporting experiences include activities such as eating and sleeping; if failure points occur with the supporting experiences, then the total customer experiences can be damaged irrespective of the strength of the peak experience [16]. The study performed by Lee, Tussyadiah, and Zach [23] explored tourist experiences through user diaries. Trischler and Zehrer [18] applied personas and service scenarios to develop tourism experiences at theme parks.

Tussyadiah [14] proposed that design tools such as touchpoints and customer journeys as stand-alone items are too simplistic for application in tourism. Hence, tourism experience design (TED) research was conducted. The theoretical framework of TED includes two steps: a meta-concept and an operational concept of tourism experience. The meta-concept of tourism experience emphasizes positioning strategy, meaning that propositions transform into the core and peripheral experiences, supported by the storytelling of these experiences at the society level (i.e., interpretation of experiences that is guided by norms, shared values, etc.). The operational concept of tourism experience focuses on integrating design elements such as touchpoints and functional and emotional clues to generate more favorable tourism experiences [14]. From the aforementioned studies on tourism design, creative tourism experiences should be well developed and enable tourists to reach a “sweet spot” [11] or “peak experience” [16].

2.3 Service Design

Service design is a multidisciplinary field that incorporates knowledge from the management, marketing, design, and research fields. The goal of service design is to provide users with holistic services by integrating various design techniques, management styles, and engineering processes. Service design must be performed from a consumer perspective to ensure that a service interface features differentiating characteristics that are feasible, useful, effective, and conform to customer expectations [24]. Service design emphasizes user-centered, co-creative, sequencing, evidencing, and holistic principles [25].

Overall, service design is the planning and designing of systems and processes through an integration of tangible and intangible media to provide customers with comprehensive and meticulous service experiences [25]. Service design can be viewed as a way to design experiences that allow customers to perceive the value of the overall process through various touchpoints [26]. Related studies have discussed how to construct the customer service journey, such as through moment mapping [27]. Service design methods and tools have been proposed by various monographs, such as stakeholder mapping, customer journey mapping, cultural probing, empathy mapping, and service blueprints. These methods and tools are applied to different aspects with different objectives. In the service process, each touchpoint that represents customer contact can be viewed as a stage of the customer experience journey. The empathy map tool helps to build up a broader understanding of what a person thinks, feels, sees, hears and does as well as his/her pain and gain points [28].

Cook et al. [29] asserted that to establish a competitive edge, service providers should emphasize interactive experiences at service touchpoints and customer emotions, behaviors, and expectations through design and management. Visualization tools can transform ideas and concepts into visible dimensions that may create greater clarity about the service design process [24]. This study also uses customer journey mapping for illustrating findings.

3 Methodology

This study applied the service design methods and tools of observation, questionnaire survey, pain and gain points of empathy mapping, and customer journey mapping at Jioufen Gallery, Ceramic Art Workshop, and Artist Teahouse in Taiwan as multiple case studies. Valuable insights from multiple target case studies are more suitable for descriptive analyses or theory construction [30]. Based on previous studies, a research framework combining service design methods and TED model [14] is put forth to explore the elements of experiential service design in creative tourism, as shown in Fig. 1.

Fig. 1.
figure 1

Research framework

Full size image

Data were collected from different creative tourism contexts: painting, pottery, and tea culture. The Jioufen Gallery displays works by local artists and serves as a platform for artists. Ceramic Art Workshop is the first of its kind in Jiufen and produces ceramics themed on the old mining atmosphere. The Artist Teahouse is located near the most beautiful seascape in Jiufen and serves as a platform for interactions between artists and collectors. In Jiufen, the Artist Teahouse is known to be very unique with red brick and selected by the New Taipei City Government as the “model building.” The various tea programs and ceramic works present the passion of the founder toward tea culture. The three cases represent local art, craft, and traditional tea culture and offer specific cultural experiences that can be categorized as creative tourism. This study is therefore suitable for exploring the elements of experiential service design for creative tourism with multiple themes.

First, the founder of the target of case studies was interviewed and documentary analysis was employed to determine the core, peripheral, and storytelling aspects of the experiences offered by the Jioufen Gallery, Ceramic Art Workshop, and Artist Teahouse. The documents used in the study included news reports, books interviews, and formal reports. These can be regarded as “mute evidence” and can provide useful information for the case studies by covering event details [31]. Subsequently, observations and questionnaires were conducted at the three sites. By using observation, the observer may have a clear picture of the customer journey in mind when following the tourist through the service experience [17] and the tourists’ experiences were directly examined. This study also employed nonparticipant observations to avoid influencing the respondents and creating bias. This data triangulation strengthens findings and increases internal validity and reliability [32]. The open-ended questionnaire avoided interference with the respondents and enabled them to express their internal thoughts and opinions freely. When necessary, interviews were conducted by the author to clarify any questions and respond to feedback.

Purposive tourists were chosen because they were more likely to have opinions and beliefs about the goals and expectations of their visits. In this study, a purposive sampling technique was adopted that enabled selection of informed empirical materials [32], and each case was supplied with ten customer surveys.

We depicted the touchpoints, activities, and behaviors of customers using a customer journey map as determined through observations, which served as the basis for a questionnaire survey. Based on the depicted touchpoints, participants were asked to describe what key activities and behaviors they engaged in during the experiential stages at the three sites. Based on the results of observation, we collected descriptions of the respondents’ behaviors at the three sites; perceptions about touchpoints with gain points (i.e., rewards or benefits) and pain points (i.e., inconveniences or problems). Next, regarding the storytelling, the participants were asked what the main experiences they perceived in the experiential stages. To safeguard the reliability of data analysis and interpretation, we interpreted the exemplars individually prior to participating in the research and explained the operational definitions of the study. For data analysis, we identified respondents’ excerpts from a careful, thematic reading of their transcripts to reflect the respondents’ perceptions and opinions relevant to the study.

4 Results

In the experiential stages, we identified the behaviors, activities, and touchpoints of the respondents as they experienced their destinations visit. For ease of interpretation, the results from the aforementioned research questions are summarized in Figs. 2, 3, and 4. The three journeys incorporate tourism experience and gain/pain points into all touchpoints the visitor had during the Jioufen Gallery, Ceramic Art Workshop, and Artist Teahouse. The sections counted ‘+N’ in the customer journey represent frequencies of gain points with good experiences, ‘−N’ represent frequencies of negative experiences, resulting in dissatisfaction and negative reactions. The gain/pain points line indicate how satisfied/dissatisfied the visitors were at certain stages of the tourism experiences.

Fig. 2.
figure 2

Tourism experiences with customer journey at Jioufen Gallery

Full size image
Fig. 3.
figure 3

Tourism experiences with customer journey at Ceramic Art Workshop

Full size image
Fig. 4.
figure 4

Tourism experiences with customer journey at Artist Teahouse

Full size image

4.1 The Jioufen Gallery

The core experiences provided at the Jioufen Gallery included tea sets, pottery works, and oil paintings of Taiwan’s local artists. As shown in Fig. 2, among the respondents, most frequently mentioned aesthetic pleasure, story of collection, and guide as their gain points within the core experiences, indicating that they perceived aesthetics, professional guide, narratives of exhibits as important elements to strengthen their core experiences. It was found that most respondents had a great experience while the professional guide to introduce the stories behind the exhibits. A respondent stated that “the tour guides provided professional and clear explanations that enhanced understanding of the connection between the exhibits and the display space as well as the backgrounds, stories, and values of the works.”

Some respondents mentioned signage, indistinctive characteristics of the gallery, circulation, artwork descriptions, and light effect as the pain points within the peripheral experiences, indicating that respondents were dissatisfied with the facilities, infrastructure, etc., to support the achievement of the core experiences. Although most respondents were satisfied with the professional guide, some respondents had difficulty hearing the tour guides due to the narrow space or were worried about accidentally damaging the displayed works. Some respondents found the works difficult to understand without a tour guide and wished for better lighting and signage explaining the works.

Regarding the storytelling, most respondents appreciated at the platform for local artworks—such as the diverse artworks, the esthetics of the nostalgic atmosphere, and an appreciation of the creative process and philosophies—at the site.

4.2 The Ceramic Art Workshop

As shown in Fig. 3, the results reveal four frequently mentioned gain points within the core experiences: ceramic works, aesthetic learning, and creative process. Some mentioned that the lack of interaction with on-site creations and without hands-on experience as the pain points within the core experiences. The respondents who were unable to interact with the artists and did not participate in hands-on ceramic making experiences were less likely to report pleasure from their visits.

The unclear signage, lack of adequate description of the artworks and award-winning pieces, artificial design, and display were the pain points within the peripheral experiences. Because passageways in the workshop are narrow, some respondents felt the workshop was not a place to linger for fear of accidentally damaging the ceramics. Some respondents also felt that the workshop displayed too many items, and the placement of items on shelves lacked design, indicating that the artificial design, facilities, and infrastructure affected the core experiences.

Regarding the storytelling, Ceramic Art Workshop is the first studio of pottery works in Jiufen and the one only where makes and sells its own products. Some respondents felt that the artist’s creations, equipment and skills displayed in the ceramic making process at the workshop constituted the value of local art life.

4.3 The Artist Teahouse

Among the three cases, the respondents described the greatest variety of gain points and the most memorable impressions at the Artist Teahouse as shown in Fig. 4. Most respondents perceived landscape, the founder’s narratives, beautifully furnished space, tea and food tasting, artist works, featured products, and great hospitality as their gain points within the core experiences. A respondent stated that “through skillful planning and design of the topography, the beauty of the natural scenery was blended with the beauty of the artistic creations.” Most respondents had pleasant dining experiences and could sense the care that went into each step of the service design. A respondent stated that “the communal tea bowl was a unique ritual from among all of our tea-drinking experiences, and the teapot shaped like Keelung Mountain was one of the founder’s original creations.”　Some of the products were derivative products created by the business founder that demonstrated his lifestyle. A respondent stated that “viewing these items was like viewing artistic works. The majority of the practical items on display demonstrated aesthetic appeal.”

The pain points included unclear service signage, information and a need for improvement in the comfort level of the meal service. Some respondents felt that the signage for the teahouse was also difficult to see when they approached the Artist House. In the dining and tea ceremony area, a respondent discovered that it was inconvenient to serve tea because the tables were too long. Moreover, one respondent felt that the waiting time for food was too long. After completing their visit, some respondents discovered that the exit was relatively far away from the entrance and were therefore confused about how to leave the building.

Most respondents appreciated the founder’s love of tea and tea culture, as well as the beauty of his efforts to preserve and activate the historical building that contributed the storytelling of these experiences.

5 Discussion

This study explored the essence of experiential service design in creative tourism from perspective of tourists. Through cross-analyses of the pain and gain points of customer journeys, we proposed the important elements of the core experiences, peripheral experiences, and storytelling of these experiences as shown in Fig. 5. Regarding the experiential stages, the findings show that creative people, thematic activities, aesthetic atmosphere, and stylish works/featured products together construct the dimensions of core experiences in creative tourism. Service and exhibition facilities are identified in this work as important dimensions of peripheral experiences. Preservation and activation of traditional building, contribution to local development, and activation of local culture are demonstrated as important dimensions of storytelling of these experiences to support the achievement of the core and peripheral experiences.

Fig. 5.
figure 5

Conceptual framework of experiential service design in creative tourism

Full size image

First, the current findings indicate that tourists learn not only through participating in activities [4, 21] but also through related creative people, stylish works/featured products, and aesthetic atmosphere which contribute the core experiences at creative tourism destinations. This study extends the literature on the related activities enable tourists to learn about the local skills, expertise, traditions, and unique qualities of a location for the purposes of creative tourism [3].

The findings show that interaction with creative people (i.e., the founders, artists, guides) of the destinations plays a very important role in creative tourism experiences. This study also extends the literature on interaction between tourists and the physical elements of the destinations, interactions with the social elements of the destinations (i.e., interactions with other tourists, locals, tourism employees, and other social networks associated with the destinations) [14]. However, distinct from other studies, this study finds that stylish works/featured products play an important role in differentiating from other tourism experiences. For example, respondents appreciated at the Ceramic Art Workshop produces ceramics themed on the old mining atmosphere of Jiufen and products such as tea sets. In this study, tourists are now searching for aesthetic and authentic experiences through the use of products at creative tourism destinations. The story, aesthetic design, award-winning objects, and stylish dimensions of products should be essential design elements of creative tourism that cause active participation by tourists.

The result with regard to learning activities demonstrated that in addition to the interactive elements consistent with Tussyadiah [14], participating in daily life activities is crucial for tourists wishing to experience a local living environment. Regarding local daily life, the study identified special cultural ceremonies (i.e., tea culture experiences), featured meals, and hands-on experiences as important elements of ‘thematic activities’ which enhance tourists’ active participation. Favorable tourism experiences can be facilitated by identifying peak tourism experiences and supporting consumer experiences and daily routine experiences, as proposed by Stickdorn and Frischhut [16]. Supporting experiences are eating and sleeping. This study differs from earlier work because the findings reveal that eating can be considered peak experiences. For example, respondents perceived peak or “sweet spot” experiences when using utensils and tableware associated with tasting and dining to gain more experience regarding tea and food culture. This finding indicates the importance of designing authentic engagement with local daily life in creative tourism.

Second, the respondents’ pain points mostly reflected peripheral experiences; some tourists could not hear the tour guides’ presentations, which might have influenced achievement of the core experiences [14]. For example, most respondents perceived esthetics within the core experiences at the three sites, but peripheral experiences were insufficient or there was a lack of explanation regarding exhibitions and inconvenient tea experience might that created pain points for some tourists. This finding is consistent with the literature, with a previous study noting that if failure points occur with the supporting experiences, the experience value could be jeopardized regardless of the strength of the peak experience [16]. Therefore, creative tourism enterprises should focus on integrating various design elements with the peripheral experiences to allow for valuable tourism experiences. Therefore, practitioners who wish to enhance tourists’ total experiences should pay more attention to these elements. Exhibition facilities, such as descriptions of exhibits, light effects, and display equipment, are important peripheral experiences that may affect tourists’ learning in the core experience.

Third, the findings show that the preservation and activation of traditional buildings is consistent with Tussyadiah [14], which proposed that storytelling experiences at the society level were guided by norms, shared values, etc. This study extends the literature on storytelling experiences at the society level by identified the norms, shared values, etc., in the meta-concept of tourism experiences by Tussyadiah [14].

Our results also imply that the storytelling experiences include not only the norms, shared values, etc., but also the activation of local culture and contributions to local development are demonstrated as important elements. For example, while tourists listen to the story of the Artist Teahouse, the featured products, such as the Keelung Mountain teapot or the communal tea bowl, can be provided to the tourists for brewing tea themselves.

Finally, the use of pain and gain points within a customer journey as a visualization tool made the results interpretable. The study combines gain/pain points of empathy maps [28] and customer journey maps [25] with creative tourism experiences that provides in-depth insights into the tourists’ experiences, implies that the proposed method recognizes reality as it is and applies service design tools to analyze and visualize tourist experiences [24]. The findings imply that pain and gain points encountered by the tourists at the touchpoints were mostly equivalent to the core and peripheral experiences. The results demonstrated that the core experiences largely reflected the reported gain points in behavior or activities in the process of interacting with the touchpoints. Respondents’ pain points mostly reflected unfulfilled expectations regarding the core and peripheral experiences with the touchpoints. The pain and gain points can be transformed into key elements of the tourism experiences through an experiential service design for creative tourism.

6 Conclusion and Implications

From an academic perspective, the findings of this study contribute to the literature on tourism experience in the creative tourism field, and within it developed a framework of experiential service design from the tourists’ perspective. This study has both theoretical and managerial implications.

First, creative tourists prefer active involvement, and they not only actively gain knowledge to develop their own skills [3] but also endeavor to enrich their minds and life experiences. Regarding the key elements of creative experience, outer interactions refer to tourists’ interactions with the environment, people, and products/services/experiences [20]. In designing touchpoints, creative tourism enterprises should focus on providing useful facilities and devices for tourists’ experiences because peripheral experiences support the achievement of core experiences.

Second, tourists gradually incline toward cultural activities [4, 21] with participative learning in the arts, heritage, or special characteristics of a place, and this provides an opportunity to create the living culture [1]. Regarding the service design principles of user-centrism, co-creation, sequencing, evidencing, and holism [25], in addition to emphasizing thematic learning activities, the importance of local daily life experiences, such as food culture and featured culture ceremonies, should be designed as core experiences in creative tourism.

The study was concentrated on the one small county of Taiwan. Thus, it has limitations. The study used qualitative research methods in the specific creative tourism contexts and collected empirical data. Hence, conclusions that are generally applicable to creative tourism in other countries cannot be easily drawn. Creative tourism has a wide range of connotations. We recommend that the framework developed in this study be applied to other creative tourism contexts, including travel experiences of museums, cultural assets, etc. The value of applying this research model in other relevant fields should be discussed.