Practical Guide to Managing Tourist Experiences

Isabelle Frochot has been a course leader since 2000 of a Master in Tourism Destination Management at the University Savoie Mont Blanc and is now the director of studies for its six Masters. She is currently supervising four PhD students. Isabelle has recently been welcomed back onto the TTRA Europe Board, and will certainly be actively involved in this association for years to come. Isabelle specializes in the study of tourist behaviour and started her research career by investigating psychographic segmentation in heritage management, rural tourism and service quality scales with the creation of HISTOQUAL. Isabelle completed her PhD at Manchester Metropolitan University and then worked as a lecturer at the Scottish Agricultural College and the Scottish Hotel School (Strathclyde University, Scotland) for five years. Since returning to France in 2000, Isabelle has moved her research focus to mountain tourism, concentrating on the analysis of the consumer experience (experience sequencing, nesting dynamics in a holiday context, immersion, and disconnection/reconnection processes in tourism consumption). She has recently been involved in projects investigating the conceptual framework of escapism, the role and evolution of memory in tourism experiences and the place of videos as a new tool in qualitative research.

• Introduction. 1. Investigating Vacations’ Behaviour. 2. Unlocking the Holiday Experience Dynamics : Why Consumers Travel and How they Engage into the Experience. 3. Deep Experiences. 4. Major Tourism Trends. 5. Generating the Experience. 6. The Experience Generator. Conclusion