ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the challenges of consumer-experience research. It outlines the growing importance in tourism marketing of experience management as a source of competitive advantage, and traces the parallel development in the consumer-behavior literature of a concern for the subjective hedonic and symbolic aspects of experience. This emphasis on the nonrational aspects of consumer decision making and behavior draws attention to the limits of the conventional forms of consumer research, which ask respondents to place a numerical value on the importance of a specifi c motivation or a discrete attribute of a destination.
