Experiential marketing for tourism destinations

The experience economy is taking a growing role in contemporary societies. In line with these developments, tourism destinations are increasingly offering experiential services to foster the development of their competitive advantage. This chapter investigates the effects of customers’ tourism engagement with experiential marketing activities and develops and tests a framework in this area. We study the relationships between customer engagement, experience, identification and loyalty. To explore these issues, we draw on tourist data collected from key tourism sites in India, including in Jammu and Kashmir. Structural equational modeling is used to analyze the data. Our findings suggest that customer engagement’s dimensions exert differing effects on customer experience and identification, which subsequently affects customer loyalty toward tourist destinations. We uncover the most salient attributes of customer engagement, with a particular emphasis on those facets that serve to increase customer experience, identification andbehavioralintention.