The Northern Lights Experience - Negotiation strategies

Abstract

With rapidly increasing tourist numbers, the potential in commercialising the Northern Lights has grown immensely over the last few years, and one can only imagine what possibilities the future holds for professional Northern Lights experience providers.

One of the biggest challenges of the Northern Lights experiences is how to deal with the natural conditions and constraints of this ever shifting phenomenon. The experience providers cannot guarantee sightings of the Northern Lights even under ideal winter conditions. However, despite the fact that nature conditions the production of Northern Lights in the nature based experience, experience providers seem to manage a way around the fact that the Aurora Borealis might be a no-show. This seems to be done through negotiation strategies, meaning to make use of staging and narrative elements in order to handle the absence of the Northern Lights. This requires a flexible and dynamic system that can be handled by the experience stager, and that can be adjusted according to the natural conditions.

The study is done from an experience perspective, and a qualitative approach with case study is used in order to conduct this exploratory study. 6 Northern Lights experience providers were interviewed and 4 participant observations were undertaken.