Mobile Ethnography as an Innovative Tool for Customer Experience Research in Tourism – A Case of the Tourism Destination Upper Austria

Service marketing has evolved from focussing on products to services to experiences. Enterprises are nowadays competing for and looking for competitive advantages in experiences rather than customer satisfaction. Even though customer experience management is nothing new, it is a field that has evolved strongly in the last years. Especially in tourism destinations, various local tourism providers struggle with providing high service quality throughout the whole customer journey. Customer experience management has thus become an interesting approach also in tourism research. This paper applies customer experience research by using an innovative research method. Mobile ethnography as a qualitative method transfers the classic ethnographic approach by using mobile devices. Thus, the customer becomes a researcher himself and has the possibility to self-structure his or her data. Especially for tourism destinations, this method allows to “follow” the guest throughout the geographical space that he or she uses and collects data in real-time and in-situ. It therefore overcomes many of the disadvantages of both classic survey studies and ethnography. However briefing of participants and incentivising them turned out to be the main challenges in two projects carried out in the Austrian province of Upper Austria.