This study examines the underlying dimensions of co-creation of an experience in the context of tourism and its effects on behavioral consequences such as tourists' satisfaction with the co-creation of an experience, subjective well-being, and loyalty to the service provider. The purpose of the study is achieved by showing that that tourists' co-creation of an experience positively affects the vacation experience and loyalty to the service provider. In turn, satisfaction with the vacation experience influences overall life satisfaction. The results of this study should help service providers change strategies and implement a platform for creating unique co-creation of experiences, allowing tourists to become more physically and emotionally engaged in the planning of their vacations. * Composite reliability. ** Average Variance Extracted (AVE) estimate.

This chapter first describes what is and what constitutes a memorable experience and addresses afterwards the issue of how to engage tourists to collaborate in the co-creation of such experiences. The chapter considers involvement in tourist experiences as a mediator and moderator variable in value co-creation. In particular, after defining the involvement construct, discussing its measurement, and presenting the different research methodologies that have been used to investigate it, the chapter discusses the main implications and consequences of tourists' involvement in the delivery of tourism experiences. Strategies that could be adopted in order to encourage tourists' engagement with the tourism firms and destinations are provided at the end of the chapter. Together with these managerial and marketing implications for tourism managers, future lines of research that may be identified from gaps identified in the literature are also discussed.

This chapter looks at culture issues as part of the discourse on resource configuration for experience value creation. It explicates the operant and operand resources tourism firms utilize in their effort to meet various types of tourist demand, and offers suggestions on how tourism firms could develop products, services and experiences motivating their customers to participate in value co-creation processes. Thus, the main focus of this chapter is to lay out the foundational perspective on resource configuration by explaining the role of both operand and operant resources in the process of value co-creation.

The aim of this chapter is to enhance our understanding of the tourist experience concept by unravelling the tourist experience value concept, and based on that, present an updated research agenda. The future research directions proposed are based on a quality-of-life approach, here scaled down to a discussion of how tourist experience influences life satisfaction by means of happiness, quality of life and well-being, with increased value. The structure of the chapter is as follows. First, the dimensionality of the tourist experience concept is explored. Second, tourist experience value, or the value of tourist experience, is defined. Here input from the field of service marketing, consumer behaviour and quality-of-life studies is merged. Finally, urgent research questions still unanswered are discussed in the concluding section.

This final chapter outlines challenges and future research directions in terms of value creation in tourist experiences and integrates the previous chapters to further delineate research directions.