Narratives on experiential tourism in Calabria

This work reports an analysis of experiential tourism as meta-concept with focus on transforming the concept of experience into tourism practice. A meta-concept that places the tourist-person and his empathetic capacity in the active immersion in the product-experience at the center of the analysis. Starting from the reflection on the new spaces in which new tourisms operate and which lead the researcher to deal with an increasingly dynamic scenario in which new research opportunities emerge. In the new spaces context the emotional and educational dimensions increasingly occupy a significant role as they characterize tourist experiences. Stories are one of the most used approaches in recent years to trace new key elements of the process of social construction of tourism knowledge. In this work, the stroytelling approach was adopted to investigate the sense of experiential tourism. The results of the qualitative survey show a precise framework of experiential tourism based on relation systems and on collaborative dimensions that innovative the Calabrian tourist offer.