This Insights piece was contributed by Dr. Mark Pelletier, Assistant Professor of Marketing, Cameron School of Business.
 
In celebration of the newly-designated Travel and Tourism Week, North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper stated that the travel and tourism industry supported over 225,000 jobs in the state and visitors to the state spent more than $23.9 billion in 2017.
 
With this positive tourism-based economic news from the governor and the inaugural Travel and Tourism Week, it is a prudent time to ask the questions, What exactly makes for a successful and highly memorable tourism experience? What makes tourists go back to a tourist destination year after year?
 
These are questions that I looked to examine in my research. I wanted to ask, What makes one purchased experience more memorable than another?
 
Purchases of tourism experiences – like beach vacations, music festivals or theme park visits – are very different than purchases of tangible products or perishable services. With a traditional product, one can touch it to get a sense of its quality and judge its utility on how well the product does its intended job. With a service, like a haircut or a carwash, one can generally see the outcome and decide how well the service was performed.
 
After a tourism experience, however, all one has to judge its effectiveness is the strength of the memories stemming from and the sensations felt during the experience.
 
So what factors make for a memorable tourism experience? After surveying over 2,000 experience-goers, five primary contributors to experiential purchase quality were identified.
 
These five factors were:

• The amount of fun and enjoyment felt during the experience
• The quality of the physical environment where the experience took place
• The level of uniqueness of the experience
• The ability of the experience to take you away from your everyday stress
• The degree to which you felt a similarity with others going through the experience with you