Experiences Through Design and Innovation Along Touch Points

Abstract

There is increased interest both by practitioners and academics in the design aspect when developing new tourism services. In particular the design of travel experiences has attracted widespread research interest over the past few years. This chapter reviews popular innovation types and experience design aspects such as design thinking and blue printing. The goal of this chapter is to merge the competing approaches towards tourism innovation; technological and administrative innovation applied to increase efficiencies and reduce cost versus customer-centric design thinking. The proposed EDIT (Experiences through Design, Innovation and Touch points) model provides a structured approach to new service development. Most importantly the model can be approached from design thinking and a traditional innovation adoption process and is flexible to accommodate different firm types and new service development skills. This chapter also discusses future theoretical and empirical studies.