In tourism services, there is often a time gap between when customers book a tour and when it starts. This study aims to examine the effects of customers’ preservice imagination on their future-oriented emotions and subsequently on dual service outcomes during the in-service stage. Specifically, the study elucidates how imagination evokes anticipatory and anticipated emotions and how these cognitive and affective preexperiences drive cocreated value (CCV) for customers and co-innovation behavior (CIB) that benefits the firm.
Drawing on service-dominant logic (SDL), supplemented by individual-level theories such as flow theory, social exchange theory and appraisal theory of emotions, this study proposes a structural model to depict the link between the preservice phase and the in-service encounter. This model was then tested by two-wave survey data (i.e. before and after the trip) from 294 tourists in Vietnam.
The findings indicated the critical roles of customer imagination in triggering anticipated and anticipatory emotions and directly fostering customer CIB. Anticipated and anticipatory emotions affect CCV but do not directly influence CIB. Moreover, CCV was the influential factor motivating customers’ CIB.
First, this study enriches SDL by extending value co-creation beyond provider–customer interactions to customers’ preservice sphere, introducing imagination as a distinctive resource that generates anticipated and anticipatory emotions and primes customers’ in-service engagement. Second, by linking preservice imagination to in-service value experience and co-innovation, the study advances tourism research with a novel conceptualization of customer contributions that bridge stages and foster collaborative value creation and provider innovation.
