The Tourist Offer of the Destination in an Experience Logic Perspective

Abstract

The aim of the chapter is to propose an application of the experience logic and, in particular, the theatrical model to organize the tourist offer for the destination. Assuming the prospect of selling experiences, it emerges that, among the various factors needed for a destination to fall within the theatrical model, there must be the indispensable presence of a director (governing body in a systemic approach), to which we refer in our proposal for possible tourist destination market-oriented management tools. According to the theatrical model inspired by Pine and Gilmore, in which they underline that each business can be considered a show business, in order to be wholly efficient, the marketing activities must be geared toward the various internal (cast) and external subjects within the organizational system, whether it is a company or a destination. In other words, it is a question of adopting an integrated managerial perspective that is widely diffused organization-wide and culturally holistic. What is to be avoided is the logic of focusing the marketing only on the final client, thereby falling into a near-sighted approach that underestimates the importance of truly satisfying an audience when all of the theater components have worked together well. Indeed, concentrating exclusively on the external consumer means ignoring the fact that, in a tourist system, there are stakeholders (internal clients, distributes, suppliers, financial backers, public institutions, mass media, etc.) whose complete satisfaction is an indispensable condition for satisfying the final client and for long-term competitive success. We propose applying the experience concept and the theater model to tourist destinations with all due conceptual caution, aware of the limitations inherent in both theory and managerial actions, in undertaking to shift into territorial contexts paradigms and tools that were developed with reference to organizational systems.