Social interaction in co creating the tourist experience An exploratory study of Chinese visitors to Japan

Tourists are increasingly looking for experiences that allow them to actively participate (Campos et al., 2015), and the role of the tourist as a co-creator, or even the sole creator, of the tourism experience is becoming widely recognized among tourism scholars and practitioners (Binkhorst & Dekker, 2009; Rihova et al., 2013; Campos et al., 2015). Some even regard active value co-creation as the most important aspect of the tourism experience (e.g.Boswijk, Thijssen & Peelen, 2007; Binkhorst & Dekker, 2009). Destinations may be viewed as a space in which tourists co-create their own memorable experiences through social and other interactions (Morgan & Xu, 2009). Following this conceptualization, social interaction among participants is an essential condition for value co-creation. Categories of social actors participating in tourism value co-creation include service providers (e.g., Salvado, 2011; Minkiewicz, Evans & Bridson, 2014), the local community (e.g., Azevedo, 2009; Richards, 2010), and other tourists (e.g., Rihova et al., 2013, 2015; Reichenberger, 2017). Surprisingly perhaps, previous tourism studies have tended to take social interactions among actors in tourism for granted, and have often treated them as inherently positive. Hence, we feel that an investigation of these basic assumptions of positive social interactions and how they are perceived by tourists is warranted. Furthermore, tourists’ perceptions and attitudes towards different types of on-site social actors may lead to different forms of value co-creation. We therefore need to study from the perspective of the tourist how different types of social actors participate in the tourism value co-creation process, and what is the relative impact of each type of social actor on this process.