Embracing the paradox of customer experiences in the hospitality and tourism industry

This paper aims to re-evaluate the customer experience literature in the hospitality and tourism (H&T) domain by employing a paradox lens and constructing a model for future research direction and practitioners. Using two co-citation analysis methods—a hierarchical cluster analysis and a multidimensional scaling analysis—to investigate 312 customer experience papers from the leading H&T journals with 22.124 citations over the 44-year period (1987–2021), we identified five knowledge foundations that have made up the intellectual structure of customer experience in H&T: experiential consumption, authenticity, memorability, place branding, and service. This result reveals the dualistic representations of the paradoxical character of customer experience including authentic/fantastical, structured/unstructured, branded/ecological, and bubbled/exposed. Based on this finding, this study developed a framework for scholars and marketers to reveal different approaches to managing the tensions between paradoxes.