Developing a forest-based wellbeing tourism product together with customers – An ethnographic approach

•Ethnography suits well in the external testing phase of tourism NSD.•Ethnographic approach brings versatile information for the purpose of NSD.•Gained information benefits the development of service concept, process and system.•The customer involvement in NSD benefits both customers and suppliers.

This study aims to examine the usability and usefulness of ethnographic approaches in new service development (NSD) in tourism. This paper discusses and describes what kind of information is gained through the process. The paper includes a case study which uses an ethnographic approach in one phase of the NSD process. The data was collected during a tourism product test phase on-site by participant observation, conducting surveys and holding group interviews. The results show that an ethnographic approach brings highly versatile and detailed information that benefits different phases of NSD and the development of the service concept, service process and service system. Some challenges were identified during the data collection, mainly related to participant observation. This study contributes to tourism management literature by providing an empirical example of how consumers are involved in NSD in the tourism industry and how an ethnographic approach can be utilised in NSD.