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Increasingly, tourism businesses introduce authentic concepts to address tourists’ search for authentic and natural experiences. This research investigates how such concepts influence tourists’ experiences. A field experiment was carried out at four mountain lodges where two authentic concepts—a local meal concept and a storytelling concept—were offered to some tourists but not others. Results showed a significant moderator effect of each of the two authentic concepts on the relationship between attribute satisfaction and overall satisfaction; when tourists experienced the authentic concepts, the influence of food and service satisfaction on overall satisfaction became stronger. These results indicate that introducing authentic concepts may strengthen the importance weight tourists place on relevant aspects of experience during evaluation.
Engeset et al. (Thu,) studied this question.