Flow Experience in Tourism Activities

Introduction

The tourism industry today is built on experiences beyond goods and services. With a famous expression in the field of tourism, “Tourism destinations are seen as theaters where experiences take place, and tourists are actors performing in these theaters” and tourism experience is evaluated as a unique concept arising from this relationship (Stamboulis & Skayannis, 2003: 41). Therefore, today, touristic products are in a transformation towards experiences, and experiences as “can be remembered after they happen” (Kim et al., 2012: 13), towards unforgettable tourism experiences (Kırtıl, 2019: 1).

It is of great importance to understand the changing and increasing tourism activities and different travel motivation trends over time, determine the strategies related to touristic activities and touristic products related to them, and decide on their production and marketing. Thus, depending on the changes in the motivations of the tourists and the trends have experienced, it is possible to determine the consumer needs and desires and to predict the most important issues in the creation of touristic offers for them (Mahika, 2011: 15). So, since touristic activities are experiences-based activities, the factors affecting the experience and the results depending on the experience are considered important. Especially recently, the concept of experience, which is accepted as a more competitive advantage than price, product features, product core benefits, or quality, has attracted increasing attention in the different disciplines (Godovykh & Tasci, 2020: 1) as well as in tourism (for example, Chandralal & Valenzuela, 2013; Kim & Fesenmaier, 2017; De Freitas Coelho et al., 2018, Kim, 2018; Sharma & Nayak, 2019; Wong et al., 2020; Wyatt et al., 2021).

Today’s consumers are in search of experiences that “activate their emotions”, “include them in the process”, “touch the hearts” and “awaken the mind” beyond consuming to meet their needs (Hosany & Witham, 2009: 4). Consumers in search of unique, extraordinary, and memorable experiences are willing to participate in activities that can provide them with these experiences (Ayazlar, 2015: 32). Tourists are in search of unforgettable tourism experiences (Scott et al., 2017) that encourage emotional engagement (Michalkó et al., 2015) and increase satisfaction (Kim, 2018). Also, creating unforgettable experiences requires understanding the mental processes that occur during a tourism experience, including many external factors (Knobloch et al., 2017; Skavronskaya et al., 2020: 1). Among these mental processes, one of the most important phenomena that can be considered in the context of activities and one of the concepts that clarify the psychological state of individuals during experiences is a mental process called “flow experience”.

Flow experience, which has its origins in Maslow’s peak experience studies in the 1960s, has developed and conceptualized by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in the 1970s. It is a research area that is currently included in positive psychology. Flow experience is also referred to as “optimal experience” or “autotelic experience”. It is also expressed as “The Science of Happiness” by the developer of the theory, Csikszentmihalyi (1975) (Csikszentmihalyi, 2018). Since 1975, flow experience research has been and continues to be discussed in many areas of human life, from sports to art, from education to working life (Turan, 2019: 181-182).