S-D- logic and co-creation in tourism industry.

Abstract

Nowadays, Value Co-Creation (VCC) has become a central paradigm for many scientific disciplines, including strategic management, consumer behaviour, and international marketing. This new revolutionary concept developed by Prahalad & Ramaswamy (2000) consider customers as a source of competitiveness for the firms. VCC put the customers in the first place and made them the most relevant group of stakeholders, especially by service industries, such as hospitality and tourism (Chathoth, Altinay, Harrington, Okumus, & Chan, 2013; Hayslip, Gallarza, & Andreu, 2013; Park & Vargo, 2012). In an attempt to formalise and measure the VCC process the DART framework has been developed (Prahalad & Ramaswamy, 2004), and it focused on four main building blocks of value co-creation process: Dialogue, Access, Risk-Assessment, and Transparency (DART). Our PhD thesis aims to examine the impact of VCC procedures in the hospitality sector. To achieve our aim, we have developed a measurement scale based on the DART model. It is the first time that a measurement scale was developed from a customer’s perspective based on the DART model and evaluated in the hospitality context. Four hundred and eighty-four tourists on their return home make up the sample of the study. Through Structural Equation Modeling (e.g. AMOS), we tested our research hypotheses. Next, we explored the effects of VCC on customer's positive experience and customer satisfaction. The results indicated that only partially the building blocks of interaction affect customer's positive experience. More specifically the building blocks of Transparency and Access have a positive impact on customer's experience while on the other hand Dialogue and Risk does not affect customer's positive experience. Additionally, there is a healthy relationship between customer's positive experience and customer's satisfaction. Finally, we investigated the effects of VCC on the perceived price and quality of hotel services through the DART scale. The results indicated that the price and quality perceptions of hotel customers are not affected by Dialogue while Access does not affect the perceived price. On the one hand, Dialogue that might be the case where Dialogue between customer and hotel was not thick and meaningful enough. While for Access a justification might lie to the fact that hotel stay was embedded in vacation package making it hard to assess hotel’s price. On the other hand, the building blocks of Transparency and Risk have an impact on perceived price and quality. Moreover, the outcomes of the study designate that perceived quality affect price perception positively. Regarding implications, DART model is a unique tool that can facilitate hotel managers to assess their hotel readiness to engage their customers to value co-creation procedures, primarily since it provides an evaluation of the VCC process from a customer’s perspective. Furthermore, DART scale can be utilised by hotel managers to reflect on the offered services critically.