Reviewing Two Decades of Value Creation in Tourism: An Attempt to Develop a Conceptual Framework

Tourism is one of the world economy pillars. In the last decades,it underwent an evolution related to consumer behaviour and technologicalprogress. Facing this evolution, several efforts were made by companies; forexample, some of them looked for new ways to create value. Despite a greatnumber of studies conducted, the literature shows less evidence related to thevariables that affect value creation in tourism companies. Hence, the objectiveof this paper is to propose a conceptual framework of value creation measurementin tourism through mapping the most frequent indicators in literature. To do so,the authors asked the following research question: what indicators of valuecreation in tourism were the most mobilized during the last twenty years? Thenthey performed a meta-analysis based on value creation papers published duringthe period ranging from 1997 to 2017. Furthermore, based on the NVivo 11 codingmethod, they processed 747 indicators, of which they considered that 66 weremore frequently used as they had been cited at least twice. The main ones areservice quality, customer satisfaction, environmental management, andprofitability. They grouped these frequent indicators in five categories,namely: customers (10), employees and skills improvement (9), environment andnatural resources (6), finance (20), and internal processes (21).