An exploratory study into managing value creation in tourism service firms: Understanding value creation phases at the intersection of the tourism service firm and their customers

• The tourism service provider's value proposition drives its value offering.
• Its value offering drives customers' perceived-value-in-use.
• Customer orientation enhances value proposition – value offering relationship.
• Customer orientation also enhances value offering – customers' perceived-value-in-use relationship.
• Value creation phases have a logical sequence which requires certain parts to occur before others are fulfilled.

To satisfy customers, managers of tourism services need to understand their customers' value requirements and then develop a unique service value offering based on those requirements. This understanding underpins their effort to provide superior value to customers and deliver the proposed services through employees. Problematically, previous work on value creation (i.e. customer value) has focused separately on either the firm or customer. This theoretical separation does not allow investigation of whether there may be discrepancies between what value firms offer and what value customers perceive they have received. We bring tourism service firms (manager and employee) and customers together and examine the nature of a tourism service provider's value proposition, its contribution to the value offering, and subsequent impact on customers' perceived-value-in-use. We focus on the important role that employees play as boundary spanning workers in the value creation phases, linking the tourism service provider and customer.