Tourist co-creation and tourism marketing outcomes: An inverted U-shaped relationship

Abstract

Extant literature typically advocates a positive linear relationship between a myriad of tourist co-creation behaviors and tourism business performance. This study challenges this conventional wisdom by probing the potential curvilinear effects of tourist co-creation on tourism marketing outcomes. The findings across three experiments manifest an inverted U-shaped relationship between the degree of tourist co-creation and an array of tourism marketing performance indicators comprising liking, participation, and recommendation intention. Furthermore, the results reveal that tourist experiential fluency may positively moderate this relationship, thereby offering measures to mitigate the negative impacts of excessive tourist co-creation on the ultimate tourism marketing outputs. This research makes theoretical contributions by cautioning against the possibility of value co-destruction and puts forward practical suggestions for tourism marketers to better manage the tourist co-creation process.