Tourism Experience Network: Co-creation of Experiences in Interactive Processes Chouki Sfandla* and Peter Björk Department of Marketing, HANKEN School of Economics, Vaasa, Finland ABSTRACT This article launches a new framework, the Tourism Experience Network (TEN), which explores co-creation of experiences. The TEN framework absorbs value as experience logic in tourism marketing. Its uniqueness illustrates structuring processes and includes consumers/tourists in the service management. A theoretical explorative technique based on literature was used to construct the TEN. It departures from interactive networks, new service paradigm and tourism marketing, and contributes to tourism experience theories. Inspiration from the Industrial Marketing and Purchasing (IMP) group was embraced to modify issues inherent from traditional networks—the ARA model. By linking this approach with experience, actors are defined as experience facilitators in tourism and networks. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Received 13 December 2010; Revised 23 April 2012; Accepted 5 May 2012 Keywords: tourism marketing; tourism experience; SD-logic; service logic; experience facilitator; network. INTRODUCTION T ourism marketing researchers have expressed a desire to enrich the literature on the foundations of tourism experiences (Ryan, 2000; Larsen and Mossberg, 2007; Ritchie and Hudson, 2009; Prebensen and Foss, 2010). Especially, the dynamic nature of service research and the current paradigm shift have reoriented our understanding of tourism toward the experi- ence as an interdisciplinary concept. Contribu- tions have largely been on a general conceptual level. In particular, the switch from the competi- tion approach to inter-firm-based networks and innovation has become the subject of increasing attention in tourism studies (Fyall and Garrod, 2005; Sundbo et al., 2007). These alterations are consistent with the pro-competitive advantages identified in the network society paradigm (Go, 2009) and with the analysis of networks that focus on the connections between market actors 1 (Araujo and Easton, 1996; Healy et al., 2001; Gummesson, 2006; Fourcade, 2007), where value co-creation in service (Vargo and Lusch, 2004; Grönroos, 2011) is essential to construct new network models based on tourism experience (Ritchie and Hudson, 2009). This form of modern marketing has challenged service/tourist firms to experiment with the co-creation of experiences. However, the majority of managers are reluctant to relinquish traditional practices and techniques (Prahalad and Ramaswamy, 2004) and discuss the tourism and travel industry in terms of experiences and networks. As a phenomenon, networks are not new (Araujo and Easton, 1996; Fourcade, 2007) and are characterized by connected and flexible systems where changes are normal in them (Halinen and Törnroos, 2005). Networks have been analysed in various settings, taking different structures and representations, for instance, in the industrial setting by the ARA model (IMP Group and Håkansson, 1982), in service (Sundbo et al., 2007), in tourism (Mattsson et al., 2005), in value co-creation (Möller and Rajala, 2007) and in 1 An actor can be a firm, persons, individuals, department, organisation, local people, etc. This study refers to actors as service/tourist firms and individuals that actively facili- tate experiences over time in the tourism and travel market. *Correspondence to: Chouki Sfandla, Researcher at CERS, Department of Marketing, HANKEN School of Economics, Finland. E-mail: Chouki.Sfandla@hanken.fi INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF TOURISM RESEARCH Int. J. Tourism Res. (2012) Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/jtr.1892 Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.