Storytelling and story staging. Co-creating value in tourism.

Abstract

This thesis is about tourism firms as co-creators of value in tourist activities. It will explore how tourism firms communicate, particularly by using storytelling, to enhance co-creation of value with tourists. A central perspective used in this thesis is Service Dominant Logic, a logic that posits that service providers can only co-create value with their customer, not for them (Vargo and Lush 2008). Through four articles, this thesis discusses and shows different ways to tell stories to engage with tourists during tourist pre-visit and visit encounters: storytelling as a value enhancer, storytelling as promotion, storytelling in guide-tourist interaction and storytelling as a way to stage a tourist activity. The studies used an explorative quantitative and qualitative approach when collecting information: a quasi-experiment was used in order to collect information via a web survey, while semi-structured interviews and participant observation was used to explore interaction in tourist activities. An overall comparison of the study findings supports the thoughts on co-creation of value put forward in Service Dominant Logic, and suggests that an integrative perspective on storytelling can enhance value co-creation. This perspective on storytelling emphasises the importance of human resources, thus increasing the level of knowledge and skills in this domain becomes an important issue for tourism firms seeking to enhance value co-creation.