Digging deep into the experience – flow and immersion patterns in a mountain holiday

Purpose This paper aims to provide a longitudinal study of a five-day tourist stay in a mountain resort, where flow and immersion are analysed to understand how consumers experience and construct their holiday stay. The need to process to a longitudinal study is motivated by the lack of research looking at what actually happens during the experience. More precisely, the long encounter of a holiday is often disregarded, and the tourist experience is studied afterwards through single and comprehensive satisfaction surveys. How consumers evolve across a holiday stay and construct their experience is an understanding that needs further investigations. Among the variety of concepts developed to study the experience, flow and immersion are particularly interesting foundations, as they bring a detailed analysis of the processes at the very heart of the experience. This study aims to identify how both these concepts develop within a holiday context and what strategic knowledge might be gained from their analysis. A qualitative study conducted on a sample of ten individuals interviewed every day of their stay provides curves showing the occurrences of flow episodes. More importantly, the study looks at the evolution of flow and immersion across each day of a holiday stay: it identifies the conditions of their emergence, their recurrence and how they influence each other. Managerial implications call for a more strategic analysis of the specific components that conduct to the emergence of flow and immersion. Design/methodology/approach The paper conducts a longitudinal study of a tourist stay over five days. Ten participants were interviewed while on holiday and upon their return with a semi-structured interview guide aiming to investigate the peaks of their day, the elements associated to those events and the meaning associated to them. Immersion was also investigated. Forty-eight interviews were conducted in the resort. Data were transcribed and content analysed to identify the main components of both flow and immersion concepts specifically in the case of a tourist holiday. Findings The findings identified that both flow and immersion co-exist and feed each other during the holiday. Episodes of flow could be identified, although they did not necessarily match all the characteristics previously identified by Csikszentmihalyi. The events associated to flow were to be found in sport activities (skiing and snow shoeing), but social cohesion and landscape beauty equally provided strong flow episodes. Immersion is a more longitudinal state that reinforces itself throughout the stay, and with flow occurrences. Immersion is strongly related to the feeling of detachment and “getting away from it all”. Research limitations/implications The mountain resort setting is unique, but the results show some commonalities with previous research. If the ski experience is specific, it does share commonalities with other sport activities that could be provided in other holiday settings. However, transferability to more mundane holiday settings requires further testing. The data collection process is particularly heavy: interviewing the same customer every day is necessarily time-consuming. The sample is composed of senior students and would need to be validated on a wider sample of tourists. Practical implications The results identify some of the components that contribute to the emergence of both flow and immersion. The elements identified, whether they are associated to the skiing activity, to the social network or the natural resources of the resort, can all be encouraged and monitored by the resort. The results give pointers to the different elements that tourism actors can act upon to boost their consumers experience. Social implications Skiing is a sport practice that is mostly represented in middle to higher social classes. The cost of skiing equipment and ski passes, but also the need to acquire competences for this activity are all limitations factors to a wider spread of skiing practice in the general population. By showing the impact of a ski stay, notably by its incredible capacity to create a feeling of detachment and restoration from every day life, the results point to the general well-being impact that mountain holiday stays can create. It is also an information that interests local authorities who are witnessing a maturity of the ski market and are looking for new communication arguments to boost the attraction of ski holidays. The role of previous experience as a booster to immersion also demonstrates the usefulness of childhood skiing practice. This can be encouraged and subsidised by regional authorities, especially through schools. Originality/value The originality of the paper is tied in with its data collection. The researchers opted for a longitudinal study of real-time experience by not only interviewing participants in situ but also every day of their experience. Those data provide a longitudinal analysis of the experience, with richer results than what traditional satisfaction surveys usually measure. The study is also original through the concepts used: flow has been used extensively by researchers but rarely to study a whole holiday experience. Moreover, the concept of immersion is a newer concept that has not yet been used to investigate the tourist experience. The results of the study show that this concept is different from flow and is particularly pertinent to study the holiday experience.

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