The value of experience in culture and tourism: the power of emotions

Due to a rising trend of cultural tourism in recent decades a number of places turned into destinations. It often resulted in strong commodification of culture whereas cultural assets and local population suffer from great number of tourism consumers. At the same time, the tourist experience in such conditions is of a low value. So how to leave a positive impression of a destination and how to create meaningful visits? Experience economy may have answers to that question. A destination image is acquired through spontaneous or created experiences. While it is difficult to manage spontaneous experiences, it is possible to create authentic and pleasant ones which may be even controlled in order to leave positive impacts both on tourists and locals as well as on cultural tourism resources. Such experiences are based on creating different innovative, spectacular and sensory stimuli which engage tourists to identify with them and/or to participate and co-create. As to achieve a real response in tourism experience, it is necessary to stimulate emotions tourists are able to identify with. Although creative tourism represents a shift from ‘ordinary’ cultural tourism by engaging visitors in the creation of their own experiences, most creative tourism programmes started to look alike: offering visitors an active participation in courses and learning experiences which may be authentic and pleasant but not necessarily stimulating meaningful emotions. The chapter will provide transdisciplinary theoretical background on experience creation drawing from the fields of psychology, culture and tourism as to progress towards the new concept: “tourist emotional engagement” (TEE). TEE is put forward as a means to deeper creative tourism experiences providing an original theoretical construct for creative tourism with added value. It is further tested on an innovative Croatian case study, Museum of Broken Relationships, based on experience co-(re)creation.