Experience Innovation in Tourism: The Role of Front-line Employees

This paper discusses how front-line employees can play an important role in innovation processes that lead tourism companies from service production to experience creation. The increasing focus on experiential value by customers in general (Sundbo and Sørensen, 2013) puts pressure on service companies to move from functional service production to creating experiences (Pine and Gilmore, 2013). This is also the case in tourism companies. In tourism, most encounters between employees and tourists operate on a service logic (Sørensen and Jensen, 2015). Thus, we suggest there is a value potential in developing such encounters into experience encounters focusing on the co-creation of experiential value. While frontline employees are central for service quality they are mostly not included in systematised innovation processes in tourism companies. These companies are often hierarchically organised and typically do not consider front-line employees to be important innovation agents (Sørensen and Jensen, 2012). However, in this paper, an analysis of an experiment in Tivoli Gardens exemplifies the innovation and value creating potential of involving front-line employees in developing new practices that create experiential value in employee-tourist encounters.