Customer Participation—An important dimension in tourism service innovation

Customer Participation has become a relatively mature theory in marketing with its fast development in the recent 30 years. This article brings this theory into the research of service innovation in tourism and holds the view that customer participation has changed into an important dimension in it. The external causes can be found in that it follows the shifting background setting from product economy to service economy, conforms to the competitive customer-centered environment in present-day hospitality industry, embodies the latest international trend in innovation theory and gains the full support of modern information technology. The fact that it represents the essence of all-round customer experience in modern tourism, helps the service providers with the actualization of their economic and social values, satisfies the mental needs of the service consumers accounts for the internal causes. The four basic and evaluative conclusions that the paper draws is that the atmosphere for tourism service innovation with customer participation is well-formed, it is high time to innovate tourism service to make customer participation a mainstream in the industry, and more researches on China's local practice of customer service innovation and cross-disciplinary studies are required. But meanwhile the author points out the limitations of the theory as a new perspective in tourism service innovation and warns the impossibility of it as a therapy to all problems.