ABSTRACT
Experiences are personal, subjective and felt. Visitors have different cultural backgrounds and expectations, how is it then possible to create similar positive and personal experiences for most if not all visitors? Tourism mediators play an important role in the process of managing and crafting the tourist experience. Using diverse examples, this theoretical chapter presents the attention structure approach to understanding tourist experiences, and explains why the control and structuring of visitor attention is at the centre of the tourist experience. It builds on and complements the many tourist experience concepts and theories. The attention structure framework situates the production and consumption of tourist experiences in the “attention economy”, and frames tourist experiences as attention products. This framework highlights the importance of not just managing the attention of visitors, it also points to the need to manage distractions (e.g. visitor anxiety, bad weather, negative preconceptions) and incorporating such distractions into the mediation of tourist experiences. By being able to control, structure and manage visitor attention, it is possible to craft and manufacture desired tourist experiences even though visitors have different backgrounds and expectations.
