Toward an ontology of tourism experience: from sensory engagement to transcendent integration

Tourism experience research has made substantial progress in examining sensory, emotional, cognitive, and technological dimensions of travel. Yet much of this literature remains fragmented, privileging external encounters or short-term outcomes while under-theorising the deeper, enduring, and humanising effects of tourism. This paper introduces the Outer-Inner-Transcendent (OIT) framework as an ontological reframing of tourism experience, conceptualising experience as a continuous flow from embodied engagement with the world (outer), through affective resonance and cognitive meaning-making (inner), toward symbolic self-alignment and transcendent integration. Drawing on interdisciplinary synthesis across tourism studies, psychology, anthropology, and philosophy, the paper identifies six interrelated experiential dimensions and explicates the mechanisms through which experiential depth emerges, stalls, or fails. Rather than treating transcendence as a context-specific exception, the framework positions it as an inherent potential within all travel experiences, contingent upon emotional, cognitive, and identity-related processes. The key contribution of this manuscript lies in integrating fragmented research streams into a coherent, process-oriented framework that foregrounds experiential continuity, inner transformation, and human existential practice. By calling for an epistemological and ontological reorientation of tourism experience research, the OIT framework opens new directions for theory development, research design, and interdisciplinary inquiry into tourism as a site of transformative engagement.