Scientific reflection of the article:

Xu, Jing Bill (2010). Perceptions of tourism products. Tourism Management, 31(5), 607-610.

The article aims to improve the understanding of the tourism product. For this purpose, it conducts an
empirical study to further develop the theory of Smith (1994) which disaggregates the tourism product
into five elements that form the tourism experience on the customer side, in contrast to the dominant
perspective from the supply side in existing research. The five elements suggested by Smith are physical
plants as central aspect, service, hospitality, freedom of choice and involvement, suggesting that both,
tangible and intangible elements play a significant role. Xu argues that Smith´s gaze on the tourism
product is from a marketing perspective, therefore necessitating further inside into the customer´s
perception. His study shall furthermore examine the structure between the five elements and manifest
the applicability to certain tourism products. To find about the importance of the five elements a survey
was conducted to tourism students in Hong Kong who had experienced all different tourism products.
The study found that physical plant was the most important aspect of the five tourism elements while
the importance of the other elements was seen as lower and in total almost equally important in the
perception of tourism products and furthermore seen as supporting elements of the physical plant that
co-create customer satisfaction. In contrast to the total importance, the elements showed major
differences when looking at the single products. For example, on festivals involvement seemed to be the
most important element while hospitality is not important in products containing major attractions. Xu
concludes that tourism products need to successfully and correctly integrate the five elements to satisfy
the multiple needs of the customer, tourist-related as well as tourism product-related. In addition, he
suggests that the core elements should be presented in advertising material to support the building up of
basic expectations.

The study states that those five elements are prevalent, which was not proven within the study thus raises
the question of whether the study contained a bias. In addition, the paper lacks formal aspects of
academic writing as the literature review only focuses on one paper, taking Smiths argumentation as
granted instead of underlining or discussing it with other theories.

Furthermore, the findings of this study are to be seen very critically because the used sample to conduct
the survey is not representative. Exceptionally asking tourism students might not promote an objective
view of a customer since they on the one hand are biased through their knowledge and what they learned
already about the tourism product and on the other hand students hardly represent the average customer
of tourism products, which is reinforced by the fact that the majority of the students were female.
Therefore, the outcome of the study might not be generalized.
Nevertheless, the study gives implications on how to build up a tourism product. For a hotel in a winter
sport region this means that the product should be built around the physical plant, therefore focusing on
the facilities and use the solid basis of the mountains as a stage. Furthermore, the other elements like
service quality and freedom of choice etc. should be built around the plant. A holistic view on the
inclusion of core and support elements is therefore suggested to develop the tourism product that shall
furthermore be communicated in all its facets.

References:

Smith, S. L. J. (1994). The tourism product. Annals of Tourism Research, 21(3), 582–595.