Chapter 7 The EA-Approach; a Customer-Centered Management System to Produce, Manage, and Assess Relevant Experiences for the Hospitality and Tourism Industry

To be successful in today's experience economy, hospitality and tourism firms need to be attentive to detail and have the right information to manage a variety of aspects related to their businesses and their performance, not least when it comes to experiences. The old-fashioned way of producing offerings based on the management's and organization's knowledge and traditional way of operating may not suffice in the future. The attention must instead be centered on the actual source of data – the customer – as they are the ones assessing the value of the offering, and they are the ones, hopefully, willing to pay for the experiences. At the same time hospitality and tourism managers get inadequate information and support from the data available in their management systems to help them in their efforts to create memorable experiences for their customers. The objective here is, by using theoretical frameworks and concepts like the resourced-based view (RBV) and customer experiential knowledge management (CEKM), among others, to analyze and develop the EA-approach from a strategical perspective to enhance the possibilities to create and maintain competitive advantages for the hospitality and tourism firms, foremost the SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises). The identified solution will therefore be the implementation and use of customer-centred management systems where the focus should be aiding the process of creating experiences, increase customer value and by this strengthen the businesses' competitive advantage. This could be of particular interest postCOVID when the industry will do everything it can to bounce back at full strength.