Designing for Visitor Engagement: A Cross-Case Study of Interaction Design in Tourism

Background/Objectives: Interactive tourism services require service objectives to be translated into meaningful visitor experiences. This study examines how design teams represented visitor motivations in interaction concepts and how documented formative feedback informed refinement. Methods: A retrospective cross-case analysis examined eight industry-engaged projects addressing membership participation or post-visit re-engagement in an anonymised resort context. Project reports, prototype representations, and evaluation accounts were compared. SUS records were examined for documentary coverage rather than used to rank prototypes. Jiaobei provided an illustrative case. Results: Membership concepts embedded benefits within practical and social activities, whereas post-visit concepts proposed cultural, narrative, identity-related, and memory-based reasons to reconnect. Reported feedback informed choices about information visibility, navigation, and participation. Jiaobei linked a proposed physical memento and gesture-based ritual to digital content; navigation feedback was associated with an added map overview. Conclusions: Four provisional principles concern valued activities, voluntary return, complementary modality roles, and recoverable navigation. Their contribution is design-oriented and context-grounded. Incomplete evaluation records, unverified multimodal implementation, and absent post-revision measurements limit empirical claims about usability gains and sustained engagement.