Conceptualising tourist experience as Gadamerian Erfahrung

Tourist experience research frequently disregards underlying philosophical debates on experience particularly neglecting the dynamic and subjective processes occurring before, during and after trips. This conceptual paper addresses these limitations by envisaging tourist experience through the Gadamerian hermeneutic approach of Erfahrung , entailing consideration of life experiences and historicity, dynamics of memories as remembering and forgetting, and language and subjective interpretation. The paper guides researchers on what to consider when implementing the alternative tourist experience conceptualisation in their research, discusses changed perspectives on key concepts in tourism and resulting methodological insights. This has major implications for future research on tourist experience providing the growing research area with more dynamic and holistic approaches considering travellers as people and not an economic dimension. • Tourist experience research neglects dynamic and subjective processes of trips. • The conceptual paper takes a Gadamerian hermeneutic approach of Erfahrung. • Incorporates historicity, dynamics of memories and subjective interpretation. • Offers a pathway to understand tourist experience from traveller's life experience. • Discusses new perspectives on key concepts and methodologies in tourism.