"Someone who purchase a service may go away empty-handed, but do not go away empty-headed” - Robert Lewis. Comment on this assertion using tourism and hospitality examples

Introduction

Unlike products that u can feel and touch , tourism services have attributes that are endemic to the sector eg intangibility ,seasonality and inseparability of the service etc,

Intangible factors in service refer to the services that cannot be seen or touched. According to Kotler and Bloom (1984), intangibility is defined as “what cannot be seen, tasted, felt, heard, or smelled”. In this sense, intangibility refers to the total lack of the good or the attribute accessibility of service through the senses.

Intangibility is the essence of service (Zeithaml et al., 1990) because it is perceived by customers in subjective and highly abstract ways (Gronroos, 2000).

Travellers now expect unique, gratifying and diverse experiences on their trips(Azevedo, 2010; Lagiewski & Zekan, 2006) because of the intangibility aspect of the industry hence creating lasting memories are the basis of the service nowadays .

The characteristics of the service industry

The service xteristics

Figure 1

Four service characteristics.

• To reduce uncertainty caused by service intangibility, buyers look for tangible evidence that will provide information and confidence about the service. – tangibles provide signals as to the quality of the

intangible service– condition of the grounds & overall cleanliness

provide clues as to how well a restaurant is run• As a niche segment of the hospitality-lodging industry,

conference centers face a continuousneed to make their products tangible. – they must differentiate themselves from resorts & hotels

Product features that conference centers use to differentiate themselves include the following:

dedicated meeting rooms that cannot be used for other purposes twenty-four-hour use, which offers clients security &

personalization (computers, briefcases, etc., can be leftin the room)

continuous coffee, not just coffee breaks all-inclusive pricing, a set price per day, per attendee The International Association of Conference Centers offers an

online database for travel planners.

• Unlike physical products, services cannot be seen, tasted, felt, heard, or smelled before purchase. – prior to boarding, airline passengers have nothing but

a ticket & promise of safe delivery to their destination– a sales force cannot take a hotel room with them on

a sales call, and when guests leave, they have nothingto show for the purchase but a receipt and in some cases souvenirs and pictures but these are not the service they would have purchased hence

• Robert Lewis observed that someone who purchases a service may go away empty-handed, but they do not go away empty-headed.– they have memories that can be shared with others

After a luxurious stay in the Bahamas, an exciting time in Las Vegas, or a family friendly visit to Disney World, all that remains for the tourist (except, perhaps, for a few kitschy souvenirs or some photographs) is his or her memory of that experience (BraunLaTour et al 2006). It is said that ‘creating memorable experiences is the essence and raison d’etre of the hospitality industry’ (Pizam 2010, p.343). In the long run, such memorable experiences may contribute to a ‘sense of exhilaration, a deep sense of enjoyment that is long cherished and that becomes a landmark in memory for what life should be like’ (Csikszentmihalyi 1990, p. 3). In today’s environment of ever more sophisticated consumers, those who deliver memorable customer experiences successfully create superior value and competitive advantage (Canadian Tourism Commission 2004; Ritchie & Crouch 2003).

Intangibility of the tourism product can be said to be immaterial nature of service (Olsen et al., 2008) –lack of ownership.An example can be that u can enjoy the accommodation service but you cant take the bed that u would have slept in.Rather u are only left with memories. Due to this fact, tourism products are difficult to describe, measure or standardize. On the other hand, they are difficult to imitate by competitors, as well. In this sense, services are experienced and “judged by the standards of the receiver, and these standards are subject to their perceptions”.

U may tangibilise the experience by way of souvenirs

Souvenirs materialize the tourism experience and enable the memory of the tourism experience to be accessed more easily. One of the reasons that tourists frequently enjoy buying souvenirs from destination places is to remember the enjoyment they had during the trip (Uysal et al 2012). According to Gordon (as cited in Timothy 2005) souvenirs can remind of people, places, and events.

Souvenir purchasing is an important element of tourism consumption, affecting the tourism experience of the visitors themselves. Products/souvenirs purchased on trips are among individuals’ most valued possessions and serves as a tangible way of capturing or suspending in time an otherwise intangible experience.

Why MTE

A memorable tourism experience (MTE) has been operationally defined as a tourism experience remembered and recalled after the event has occurred. It is selectively constructed from tourism experiences based on the individual’s assessment of the experience (Kim et al 2012).

A memorable tourism experience serves to consolidate and reinforce the recollection of pleasurable memories of the destination experience (Ritchie & Ritchie 1998). n concepts ,models MTEs and theories like the play theories that can be used in trying to capture the uniqueness of the tourism and hospitality sector .

The MTEs model was proposed in order to cover the gap of the intangibility aspect where the guests only had memories .so for them to have lasting and impressionable memories the model was created

Kim developed a 24-item MTEs scale consisting of seven dimensions: hedonism,refreshment, local culture, meaningfulness, knowledge, involvement and novelty (Kim,et al., 2012)

‘Hedonism’ refers to experiences associated with emotions such aspleasure, excitement and enjoyment. ‘Refreshment’ is associated with feelings of freedom, liberation and revitalisation

reported by travellers on a memorable trip. The third dimension, ‘local culture’, represents travellers’ experiences of friendly local

people; ‘meaningfulness’, indicates travellers’ engagement in personally significantactivities. ‘Knowledge’ is the exploration of new cultures and the acquisition of newknowledge on a trip; the sixth dimension, ‘involvement’ represents travellers’ activeparticipation in memorable tourism experiences. The final dimension, ‘novelty’denotes unique experiences encountered by travellers

during MTEs.

Consequently, tourism programs should include opportunities to experience local culture. A number of ways to enhance this experience are possible. For example, the use of unique transportation modes while traveling in a destination area (such as a zippni in the Philippines, a gondola in Venice, or

a dog sled in Alaska), staying in a traditional type of accommodation(such as a Ger./Yurt in Mongolia or an Ondol in South Korea), and

the provision of tours to a location in which individuals can naturally observe and interact with local people, such as a traditional market, would enhance an individual’s experience with the local culture.

if companies succeed in providing memorable experiences to tourists, the tourists benefit as well because they get a special experience as opposed to simply a pleasant trip (Murray et al 2010).

By providing unique and memorable experiences, hospitality and tourism operators can differentiate themselves from the rest of the crowd and gain a competitive advantage over those who continue to offer the same old products/services (Azevedo 2009).

Kensinger (2007) found that negative emotions boosted not only the subjective vividness of a memory but also the likelihood that event details are remembered.

The valence of an event (i.e. whether it is pleasurable or aversive) seems to be a critical determinant of the accuracy with which the event is remembered, with negative events being remembered in greater detail than positive ones. In fact, Christianson (as cited in Kim 2009) states that people remember negative emotional events better than ordinary events that occurred equally long ago.

In a tourist destination, tourists may often feel negative emotions during their tourism experience, for example, due to lack of management (Plessis et al 2012), physical incongruence and unprofessional employee behavior (Walls 2009) etc. Pine and Gilmore (1998) provide supporting claims, by saying that a poor service easily converts into an experience, creating a memorable encounter of a negative kind.

Conclusion

Because of the intangible aspect of the tourism and hospitality sector ,where a guest or traveller is left with memories its of important value from the above that emphasis be put in creating a memorable tourism experience .

This is because the intangibility aspect is not about the money or assets one has but about lasting impressions which creates an experience,

The experience can either be +ve or a _ve so its of impotance to create tve experiences as they can promote repeat business.