Creating joint experiences - Families engaging with a heritage site

Abstract

Interactions between family members constitutes an important element of engagement with tourism sites, leading to enhanced value creation. Yet we know little about how these engagement practices lead to experience outcomes. Studies of visitor engagement have explored C2C value co-creation contexts, adding to our understanding of social practices as a source of value outcomes. This study adds to this literature through a focus on the intimate social context of families’ collective engagement practices, viewing the family unit as constituting a complex amalgam of individual, relational and collective resources (Epp & Price, 2008). Adopting a multi-stage and multi-method qualitative research design, we identify seven practices through which families engage with attractions, including: absorbing, interacting, information sharing, explaining, constructing meaning, competing and deviating. Families associate these practices with experience outcomes: bonding, creating memories, entertainment, and learning. The findings inform the design of effective engagement platforms and resource deployment to facilitate group experiences.