Toward extending creative tourism: participatory experience tourism

While the “creative turn” in everyday life has led to rapid development of creative tourism, not all forms of creative tourism use the same intensity of creative involvement. It is possible to distinguish between more passive and active involvement. In parallel, a “social turn” has led to popularity of forms of tourism, such as volunteer tourism, involving active participation. The purpose of this paper is to put forward ideas and present eclectic observations on active tourist participation around both the creative and social turns. Hence, it should be treated as a springboard and testing ground for these ideas and observations.

This study is based on theoretical conceptualisation with empirically derived supporting examples.

A new descriptor, “participatory experience tourism”, is advanced and argued to be preferable to reframing “creative tourism” to capture varied forms of experience involving active tourist participation. “Participatory experience tourism” is put forward as an extension of creative tourism and as an umbrella construct is further expanded upon to include notions of value addition.

Structured empirical substantiation of the conceptual ideas in this paper is a future research need.

The paper provides an original theoretical construct to better account for forms of active tourist participation that have emerged from the creative and social turns that characterise contemporary society, and also heightens awareness of a key link in the experience value addition chain.