Brief Presentation of the Contributions

This Special Issue follows the 22nd Nordic Symposium in Tourism and Hospitality Research, “Innovation
and value-creation in the experience-based tourism”, arranged in Bodø and the Lofoten Islands in 2013
within the frames of the research project Northern Insights funded though The Norwegian Research
Council. Authors who presented extended abstracts to the conference were invited to submit full papers
in a Special Issue of Scandinavian Journal of Hospitality and Tourism. The editors received about 30
manuscripts that went through a double-blind reviewing process. On the way, supplementary
manuscripts were invited to be subject for review with the aim of publication. Several papers had to be
rejected for various reasons and finally we ended up with eight papers that went successfully through
the process.

The contributions of this Special Issue embrace findings from a body of quite varying points of departure
that include foci on the tourist experience concept, from both the firms side and the marketing side.
Topics such as behaviors of destination visitors and their length of stay, brand personalities, the role of
guides for client value perceptions, experience innovation design from the perspective of the companies
as well as from a wider range of stakeholders, publications on tourism entrepreneurship and the role of
destination boards are included in this issue. Subsequently, a short summary of the main content of the
eight independent articles of this issue and how they can be positioned within the tourism research
agendas are presented.

The first four articles presented focus on the understanding of tourist experiences and how values can
be created for tourists who are visiting a destination and enjoying destination activities and thus
contributing to increased long-term value-creation potentials for tourism businesses.

Initially, the understanding of key dimensions of tourist experiences is of great importance for tourism
businesses entering into processes for creating valuable experience for their customers. In the article of
Jensen, Lindberg and Østergaard, “How can consumer research contribute to increased understanding
of tourist experiences? A conceptual review”, the authors explore how perspectives within the field of
“consumer culture theory” (CCT) research can contribute to progress in studies of tourist experiences
within tourism research. The article initially offers a brief review of some of the seminal contributions on
tourist experience within tourism research, primarily from tourism sociology and psychology research,
and then presents a comprehensive review of the state of the art and findings from the two main
perspectives of CCT research. The article then discusses how the scientific development and the major
perspectives from CCT may contribute to new and complementary ways of conceptualizing tourist
experiences.