ABSTRACT
The objective of an experience design process is to generate an experience design that accounts for what customers want and prefer but also what the provider wants and is able to offer. A successful experience design process results in the design for an experience that can be staged and managed successfully.
However, success can be measured in different ways, such as customer satisfaction or profit. Moreover, the design process can take on many different forms and use many different design methods. This chapter reviews a range of approaches, tools and methods that could be used for designing experiences and their relevance and applicability for designing specific types of experiences within tourism contexts.
This chapter could assist future and current tourism professionals in tackling the challenge of designing tourism experiences successfully. It provides crucial reference points for experience designers to ensure that their design processes do not result in the right solutions for the wrong problems or the wrong solutions for the right problems. It also contributes to literature by bridging the gap between design thinking approaches to experience design and engineering approaches to design. It shows how these two perspectives can strengthen each other within real-life tourism experience design efforts.
