Chapter 15 The End of Experience Economy Tourism
The experience economy has captured tourism. Visitors no longer purchase transportation, accommodation, and attractions. They purchase experiences: authentic, transformative, memorable, Instagram-worthy. Tourism marketing has mastered the selling of experience, and tourists have learned to value experience above all else. This chapter argues that the experience economy paradigm is both philosophically confused and practically harmful. Meaning must replace experience as tourism's organizing concept.
The experience economy concept emerged from business theory in the late 1990s. Pine and Gilmore's influential formulation argued that economic value progresses from commodities to goods to services to experiences. Experiences command premium prices because they are memorable, personal, and engaging. Businesses should therefore stage experiences rather than merely provide services.
Tourism was an obvious application. Destinations were already in the experience business. The experience economy framework gave them a language and methodology for doing it better. Design memorable experiences. Create Instagram moments. Stage authenticity. The framework spread through tourism marketing and management, becoming orthodoxy within a decade.
The problems with experience economy tourism are both conceptual and practical. Conceptually, it confuses means and ends. Experience is valuable when it serves other purposes: learning, connection, meaning, growth. Experience for its own sake is empty. The experience economy treats the appearance of significance as equivalent to significance itself.
Consider the staged authenticity that pervades tourism. Communities learn to perform their cultures for visitors. The performance may be technically accurate, with the right costumes, the right dances, the right words. But accuracy is not authenticity. The performance is a commodity, produced for exchange, disconnected from the social relationships and cultural meanings that made the practice meaningful.
Tourists often cannot tell the difference between authentic culture and staged performance. They see what looks traditional and assume it is. They take photographs, feel they have experienced something real, and return home satisfied. The experience has been delivered. But what have they actually received? An image without substance, a form without content, a performance without meaning.
The experience economy also produces acceleration. Because experiences are valued for being memorable, destinations must constantly produce more intense, more novel, more dramatic offerings. What was memorable last year is routine this year. The experience arms race escalates, with each destination trying to out-experience competitors. This escalation benefits neither tourists nor hosts.
Tourists caught in the experience escalator find that ordinary experiences no longer satisfy. The beautiful becomes boring. The unusual becomes normal. Each trip must top the previous one. This is the hedonic treadmill applied to travel, producing tourists who require ever more stimulation to achieve the same level of satisfaction. They are not becoming better people. They are becoming harder to please.
Hosts caught in the experience escalator must constantly innovate to remain competitive. Traditional ways of life must be enhanced, dramatized, made more experiential. Authenticity that once emerged organically must now be designed. The pressure to produce experiences transforms communities into performance spaces, their members into performers, their culture into props.
The practical harms extend further. Experience economy tourism values sensation over substance. The tourist seeks to feel, not to understand. They want to be moved, not to engage. This orientation produces tourism that extracts emotional value while providing nothing in return. The host becomes a stimulus, a means to the tourist's experience, rather than a person with their own purposes and perspectives.
The alternative is meaning-centered tourism. Meaning differs from experience in crucial ways. Experience is subjective and immediate. Meaning is relational and persistent. You can have an experience alone; meaning emerges in relationship. Experience ends when stimulation ceases; meaning shapes how you live afterward.
Meaning-centered tourism would prioritize understanding over sensation. The tourist would seek to comprehend the place, its history, its people, its challenges. This comprehension would not be passive reception but active engagement. It would require effort, preparation, and openness to having one's preconceptions challenged.
Meaning-centered tourism would also prioritize relationship over observation. The tourist would enter into connection with the visited community, however provisional. This connection would involve reciprocity: not just receiving from hosts but giving in return. The encounter would be mutual, not extractive.
Finally, meaning-centered tourism would prioritize transformation over memory. The goal would not be to accumulate experiences to remember but to become someone different as a result of the encounter. Transformation is not guaranteed; many encounters fail to transform. But orienting toward transformation creates conditions where it becomes possible.
The experience economy has already begun to encounter limits. Some tourists report exhaustion with constant stimulation. Some seek slower, deeper alternatives to the experience escalator. The voluntary simplicity movement in consumption has parallels in tourism. These are minority positions, but they indicate that the experience economy is not the only possibility.
Marketing would need to change. Instead of selling experiences, destinations might sell opportunities for meaning. This is harder to commodify, which is partly the point. Meaning resists packaging. It emerges from genuine encounter, which cannot be guaranteed, only facilitated. Marketing that acknowledges this would be more honest, if less effective by conventional measures.
Infrastructure would need to change. Experience economy tourism requires experience infrastructure: stages for performance, attractions for sensation, platforms for sharing. Meaning-centered tourism requires different infrastructure: spaces for encounter, time for relationship, support for transformation. The physical environment shapes what becomes possible.
Education would need to change, both for hosts and visitors. Hosts would learn to facilitate meaning rather than stage experience. Visitors would learn to seek meaning rather than collect experiences. This education would challenge the consumer orientation that experience economy has cultivated but would offer richer rewards.
The end of experience economy tourism is not the end of tourism. It is the end of tourism organized around maximizing subjective intensity. What replaces it is tourism organized around cultivating significance. This is a modest goal in some ways, since it makes no grand promises, and ambitious in others, since it asks for genuine transformation. The experience economy promised more than it could deliver. Meaning-centered tourism promises less but might deliver more.