Total Tourism Experience and Viral Environment: Epistemology and Management of Tourism Destinations

Introduction

Experience is for all People, a synthesis characteristic of their life, meaning both the actions and the resulting effects of the acts in which every single person is involved, by their own will or by other circumstances. Experience can be also a way for everyone to act individually or in a gregarious way, carrying out actions by using their senses applied in a certain context of place and time. If we consider the term viral and relate it to the context of the health crisis and the context of tourism, we generate a scenario in which one and the other interact in a demanding way: that finding clear, fast and systemic communication becomes a case of scientific interest.

Travelling in a warm climate or eating in an icy, Nordic cultural dwelling always means using the senses and memory. Tourism planners rely on this human constancy. In this logic, each human being is the subject of his own reality, and of what he learns and apprehends by experiencing situations. The acquisition of knowledge through the practice of an activity which takes place naturally (in direct contact with Nature), at the mercy of the natural elements, or activated for scientific purposes (in direct contact with Culture), becoming a laboratory for experimentation, creates an explanatory hypothesis with experiential components. Experimentation and the awareness of knowing oneself as the bearer of knowledge composed of empirical culture, linked with theoretical culture, connects both in the experience of every human being. Productive activities aimed at raising the social and economic conditions of society put the human being to the test. The world that is experienced is the total world that we manage to consider, according to our possibilities, only conditioned by our limits. In that sense, the management of experimentation is fundamental to innovation in tourism, particularly in the thematic tourism segment.

In a hedonistic society, this is an unavoidable reality because human ambition is also total. Achieving a gratifying experience, as total as possible, is the consumer's goal in relation to the objects he acquires. The management of experiences in tourism takes a particular position and the mnemonic that we present, in the ETT (Experiência Turística Total - Total Tourism Experience) form, as we will explain, can configure a part of the response that has to be given for the tourism revival in times of health crisis. Thus, the present chapter (which configures the first part of a series of three future publications) intends to present an exploratory study that starts from an empirical approach, with the objective of establishing a new technical-scientific concept (ETT). It focuses on the evolution of the paradigm of consumption in tourism, accentuated in recent years, highlighting for this, the relationship of the main developers and managers of tourism, with the viral environment and the experience that is perceived by the tourist.