Experience Design in City Tourism

How to design experiences: ’Experience design in city tourism’ has gathered 14 city tourism organisations from most of the larger cities in the Nordic region. The project aims at gaining knowledge about the experiences that tourists have, want and remember in the cities.

By doing so, the objective is to improve the experiences that are supplied and demanded in the cities. To reach the objective a series of different analysis elements have been conducted. As a starting point, experience design as a concept was investigated by a research team, which led to the development of the framework of the project.

In August 2007, a large comparative interview study of more than 5.000 tourists was conducted. The study focused upon gathering as much relevant information about the tourists as possible, e.g. inspiration sources, reasons to go, motivations to experience, specific activities, image of the city etc. as well as background variables such as age, travel group and gender. This study has given the possibility to benchmark 14 cities in many different aspects and gives each city a unique possibility to analyse its strengths and weaknesses.

A large amount of desk research has been conducted to get the full picture of experience design in city tourism. Hence, social media websites such as tripadvisor.com and flickr.com have been analysed in terms of how the cities are presented and perceived. The official websites have been analysed to see how they perform. And best cases of experience design have been analysed to find benchmark cases.

Project duration: April 2007 - June 2008

Contact person:
Ole Kjaer Mansfeldt, Wonderful Copenhagen