ABSTRACT This article presents a customer‐centric, journey‐oriented, and multidimensional approach to exploring the time flow of customer experience in tourism. Based on a qualitative single‐case study of tourists traveling on the Eastern Express, an overnight passenger train in Turkey, we investigate how specific dimensions of the customer experience (i.e., sensorial, emotional, cognitive, and behavioral) are anticipated, experienced, and remembered, and which themes emerge during the transition across the customer journey. The findings reveal that visual and motor impressions (sensory), joy and comfort (emotional), nostalgia and learning (cognitive), and talking and sharing the experience with others (behavioral) are the most prevalent themes that enhance participants' pro‐ and retrospection. Our study is among the first in tourism to extend an ethnographic approach (interviews, observations, archival data) with digital methods, employing a grounded, iterative analysis of Instagram posts to understand how social technologies mediate the temporal flow of customer experience.
Reitsamer et al. (Sun,) studied this question.