A Visitor Experience Scale: Historic Sites and Museums

Since Pine and Gilmore (1999) proclaimed the arrival of the experience economy era, research on tourists’ experiences has become an area of growing interest among scholars and practitioners. Gaining knowledge of the experiential features of tourist activities at historic sites and museums is of paramount importance for tourism operators to understand and satisfy tourists’ wide-ranging needs. With this concern in mind, the purpose of this study was to develop a multiple-item scale to measure tourists’ experiences of visiting historic sites and museums. Following the scale construction procedure suggested by DeVellis (2003), we developed an experiential scale with 17 embedded items in five dimensions: entertainment, culture identity-seeking, education, relationship development, and escapism. The data support this dimensional structure as well as its internal consistency and validity. This study serves as an initial attempt to explore the seemingly amorphous nature of tourists’ experiences at historic sites and museums. The findings offer important practical implications for historic sites and museums in relation to experiential marketing.