25 - Lucia Groe, "Narratives on Experiential Tourism in Calabria" (2025)
2. Research objectives and theoretical framework
The analysis on experiential tourism was conducted taking into account a theoretical framework which includes various contributions. One of the first steps taken in the analysis was to read and interpret the experiential tourism as relation, as meeting with the other, then the attention was on the relationship between practices and space,finally the analysis went into the storytelling of both experiences and regulations and (tourist) political lines.
Experiential tourism must be read and analyzed within the Relationship Paradigm (Bar-rett-Lennard 2013).
The author considers the human condition as an intertwined tapestry of multi-level relationships and that, traditionally, the relationship implies connection, exchange between individuals or groups, where each is aware of the other. This includes relationships within
Table 1 Collaborative group
ActorsRoleDetails
Local operatorsAssociations, Cooperatives, villages, tour operators,etc.They offer experiential performances with direct immersive events,
They use a storytelling approach
Regional tourist DistrictsRegulatory tool for the aggregation of territories with potential tour-
ist attractions expressed in a homogeneous and complementary way
Local action groupsGroups made up of public and private entities operating in rural
areas
They have the objective of redeveloping and relaunching the tourist offer
They accompany the tourist operators in the integrated planning of the territory
Territorial organizationsTerritorial collaborative formsThey support important processes of co-construction of a tourist offer proposal
Natural Parks and tourist guides National and/or regional entitiesThey support experientiality through services
Institutions and expertiseRegional entities that operate on several levels of different levels of
government and expertness, scholars, etc.
They support the debate on experiential tourism with studies, data and research
Source: author elaboration, 2023
the self, interpersonal relationships, relationships between and within communities, organizations, and nations, and relationships with animals.
The author describes the relationship as a bridge between lives, an exchange of feelings, stories, ideas, intentions and actions. A bridge that unites people-islands that stand out in their being.
The relationship looks at the other and becomes a place to live an experience.
The tourist experience in this work is read through the concept of meeting with the other different from me and with the border. Current society redesigns space where it becomes difficult to conceptualize the border beyond which otherness is placed.
The practice of tourism sets in motion cultures and identities that enter into a relation-ship with each other and with others. This practice clashes with the hyper-individualistic atomism and the need to build the foundations of a new sociality that recognizes the obli-gations that derive from relating to each other. (Cesareo 2004).
In a context where experience is what builds the relationship between the subjects (tour-ist and host community) it is important that there are no barriers to hinder the methods of interaction, for this reason the border here is not intended as an obstacle, but it is inter-preted in terms of porosity, of the possibility of exchange between identity and difference, between inside and outside. Bion (1961) argued that the boundary is a boundary only if it is porous.
The porosity allows transit, allows listening to the foreigner’s experience. The foreigner who crosses the porous border is not only the human subject of another nation, he is also the unconscious, the shadow that is inside everyone. If the border becomes a barrier and the defenses are raised, life ceases to be such and leaves room for imposition, panic con-trol, avoidance, loss of the sense of I am because you are. If Relationship Paradigm shows human dimension in the explanation of experiential tourism, the concept of place focus the analysis about relations system with the territory and the community.
Starting from the concept of place, it is shown that tourist practices are strongly inter-twined with spaces. They are altered, consumed, valued or protected spaces; isolated spaces or integrated with those ones usually used by the residents of the host community. The force of tourism acts on places by ensuring that the dialectic between the organized system of tourism, the socio-cultural and the environmental one is enriched with new elements of adaptation and mitigation. A dialectic aimed at starting an organizational and planning pro-cess worked towards at revolutionizing the tourist offer, not surprisingly Simonicca (2004) writes: “tourism […] is hinged on everyday life.”
Space, respect to tourism, can be read in terms of:
Process of territorialisation, ie attribution of values, symbols, meanings that define tourist attractiveness;
Identity (physical and socio-cultural), in terms of attractive resources, relationships, behaviours, culture and tradition;
Consumed/used space, in terms of transformation that produces the denomination of new tourism spaces.
The evolution of tourism phenomenon shows more and more its new social implica-tions, and how the relations with element which constituite it are changed. One of the elements which helps us to read this kind of new relation are the new spaces. The new spaces of tourism are a clear expression of new tourisms. New spaces are areas of analy-sis in which new concepts and new tourist knowledge are carried out. New concepts on experiences are linked to more marginal territorial areas that become new tourist
destinations, new forms of hospitality, new forms of planning and programmation and new forms of promo-marketing. These are the essential elements through which experi-ential tourism is made explicit.
The new tourism spaces are therefore read, interpreted and organized on the basis of:
The organizational capacity of the territory (physical data), ie the creation of tourist facilities;
The planning process, ie the personalization of tourist practices;
To the tourist competitiveness in the contexts, in terms of new policies and tools for management and planning and for tourism development.
The scientific debate around tourism highlights strong and deep transformations that the tourism phenomenon is experiencing. The dynamic evolution of tourist demand has a strong impact on tourist practices by increasingly enhancing the relational aspect, i.e. the one inherent in the relationships between people, things and places in which the practices take place.
The most recent studies show that the management of tourist resources and tourist spaces moves further and further away from the logic of mass tourism and increasingly aligns itself with new alternative approaches.
The possibility of building an alternative organizational and tourist management path to the mass one calls into question a series of much discussed opposites: tourists—resi-dents, free time—work time, vacation space—everyday space, attractive resources and their transformation into elements of tourism with a vision aimed at experientiality.
To fully understand the decision-making processes inherent in experiential tourism practices, it is necessary to understand what experience is and how it acts in the tourism sector.
The analysis of experience as an innovative way of redesigning the tourist offer is certainly not a novelty in the field of literature and tourism. For this reason experiential tourism, in this work, is explained in terms of meta-concept and not as a new concept.
In this particular case, the meta-concept of experiential tourism refers to the need to go beyond the meaning of experience we are used to. It means highlighting the transfor-mation, the change of the concept over time. Experiential, therefore, refers to the trans-formation of experiences and refers to a new way of organizing them. Re-organising experiences focuses on a new way of responding to the tourist social demand in terms of:
Structuring the experience in the tourist offer on the basis of new logics;
Interpreting the tourist’s request to live the experience not as a standardized tourist package, but as a memory and emotion to remember.
The ability of the tourist operators to enter a process of building an experiential path and to reveal what lies behind it plays a fundamental role on the interpretation of the requests. Caloggero (2022) referes to the tourist operator as an interpreter of the experiential prac-tice, and he writes: "The interpreter does not provide information but reveals the profound truth that is hidden behind appearances, the participant in an interpreting experience does not know but discovers”.
The reorganization of experience is not as simple as it may seem, because experiences are subjective and highly personal. They are in fact related to the aspect of perception, learning, memory, empathy and past participation in a particular event. Today, more and
more experiences meet the various aspects of tourism, making the management of the resulting products difficult and complicated.
Experience is not a new concept especially in the practices of sustainable tourism and slow and creative tourism of small destinations and villages, what is new is the way in which the experience-product allows you to experience the community, postponing the analysis to the more operational form of the transformation of experience (Groe 2022).
It presents itself as a strengthening of a motivation more oriented towards the human and relational dimension to the point of making it a phenomenon that by now we could define as mature, which has its specific place within the market and its important role in the political process. The latest sector reports (Expedia, Booking, Skift, Phocuswright, Tour-scanner, 2019; Altexsoft, American express, 2022) proclaim it as a global trend, such as that tourism capable of transforming small economies and accelerating post-covid restart responses. It would seem obvious to think that the path of enhancement and management of processes, direct or indirect, associated with experiential tourism is all downhill, but it is not like that, and it is not, above all for those small tourist realities that still do not have clear how to organize themselves for address the dynamism of tourism demand. It is unthinkable that good solutions are always rightly posed to answer every type of problem. Not always, in fact, good solutions in the wrong context will produce good results.
In the tourism sector, dealing with experience means turning to a new type of offer characterized by companies that create unique multisensory events, capable of allowing learning through direct participation and involving customers in a memorable way (Schmitt 1999; Pine and Gilmore 1999). The product/service-experience is representative of a new economy where demand is increasingly filled with the evolution of contents. Experiential tourism, therefore, means dealing with the evolutionary stages of tourist demand.
In this work, the analysis of experiential tourism is enriched with multidisciplinary the-oretical contributions, both in the economic and marketing fields and in the psycho-social field.
The analysis is actually characterized by different levels of study which are shown below:
Concept of tourist experience
Concept of human relations
Concept of meeting with the other as the fulcrum of the tourist experience
Concept of organizing a tourist experience.
The authors Pine and Gilmore (1999) argue that “ experiences represent a kind of eco-nomic product that already exists but has not yet been articulated […] and that recognizing them as a new economic offer provides the key to understanding future economic growth”. The companies that will be able to respond adequately to this change will be the eco-nomic forces able to control the product and create new economic value, but not all com-panies will be able to do so, many of them will leave the sector, especially those which will continue to be limited to the product and/or service. For this reason, companies will have
to become directors of experiences and stage them in a memorable way.
Experience, in the vision of Pine and Gilmore (1999), allows us to overcome the con-cept of standardization of the product. It clashes with the tendency of advanced industrial societies to uniform and standardize the standard of living, the behavior and the attitudes of the individuals of a social community.
So, experience is a broad concept that lends itself to different definitions that can be found in different disciplinary fields. It is usual to find this concept above all in the
economic and marketing literature, linking it in a particular way to the offer category. In fact, we often speak of experiential marketing considering, in this case, the experience as instrumental to the provision of services or the sale of products, and of experiential offer when it itself is the object of an offer. However, the experience also extends to other areas that particularly concern learning and emotion, this allows us to understand that experience accompanies every human action and allows us to focus attention on the individual, on his cognitive, emotional and spiritual abilities. Shifting attention to the individual, in tourism, means shifting attention to the tourist, also called consumer or guest. Therefore, a tourism based on strategies aimed at promoting an experiential tourist offer, of a specific tourist destination, allows us to think about the design processes of the offer with a consumer-centric approach, i.e. shifting the attention from the product to the consumer, to its needs, its needs and its necessities.
In recent times, more and more tourist experiences are not only analyzed as new rela-tionships, and as a new way of relating to the place, but also as stories to be told to enter and touch the most empathic and emotional part of the tourist.
Social scientists have different analytical approaches and tools at their disposal to tell tourism, but in this paper I will look at storytelling.
Why exactly storytelling? Why stories matter, not only in the explication of expereince in a specific destination, in the identification process with the place, in the building of rela-tions, but also in the tourism policy-making. Because every law, every policy guideline, every policy advice is a narrative. (Lowndes 2016).
Fiction offers new forms of discovery and opportunity, it is a sequence of events, expe-riences and actions with a story that holds the different parts together into a meaningful whole.
To understand the role of narrative and storytelling aimed at supporting the decision-making process, it is necessary to understand the tourism regulatory environment at the various levels of operation.
Tourism is a complex field of study that cannot easily be placed in a single theoretical and methodological framework. The interdisciplinary approach captures and analyzes ele-ments that in the overall analysis pose a clearer and more detailed overall picture. This is dictated by the reason according to which tourism was mainly conceived and studied as an economic phenomenon and therefore initially falling within the scope of economic-statis-tical disciplines. The observation of the phenomenon, in fact, made it possible to measure and evaluate, in a particular way, the flows, the expenditure, the induced activities of a given area, the life cycle of a tourist destination, until it was realized that, such analyses, failed to envelop and analyze the social implications of the phenomenon.
But tourism is also and above all a social fact. It is a phenomenon that changes and evolves continuously, and it is therefore necessary to understand its implications outside the economic-statistical contexts. Attention therefore shifts to its origins, to its environ-mental and socio-cultural impacts, to the motivations and needs of tourists that feed a changing tourist demand to which the tourist offer struggles to respond in a timely manner.
Storytelling is considered the art of narrating. Tourist storytelling is the art of narrating or communicating a tourist destination. The storytelling technique is based on the story technique, the one in which the tourist identifies and feels part of the story. It is a personal approach because it is aimed at people and moves emotions and sensations.
The authors D’Errico and D’Errico (2022) referring to the emotional aspect of (calabrian) tourism say that the places have a soul and it is up to us to discover it in tourist and knowledge trips.
Paragraph 3 of this paper will show how tourist experiences are told and organized.