Exploring the Differences Between Educational and Escapist Experience Stagers: A Multiperspective Approach

Experience stagers facilitate augmentation of travel experiences among tourists. Regarding tourist attractions as experience stagers, this article adopts a multiperspective approach to understand whether cultural attractions with ideographic and organizational disparities are different. First, Pine and Gilmore's experience framework was applied to classify two major types of cultural attractions, heritage sites and cultural events, as educational and escapist experience stagers. A series of comparisons of these two experience stagers was then conducted with respect to visitor perceptions, sociodemographics, and travel patterns. The results suggest that while these experience stagers were similar in some aspects, such as facilitating visitors' attainment of cultural benefits and attracting participants who shared some sociodemographics and travel pattern characteristics, they were significantly different in pulling visitors to attractions, promoting social benefits, and attracting visitors who were heterogeneous in other sociodemographics and travel patterns. Several managerial and theoretical implications of the study are discussed.