Developing nature-based tourism products with customers by utilising the Delphi method

•The Delphi method suits front-end phases of NSD well.•The method brings versatile information for the purpose of NSD.•Delphi suits for gathering subjective judgements and finding new product ideas.•Information gained benefits the development of service concepts and processes.•The customer knowledge about the context and situation influences the outcome.

The aim of this study is to assess the suitability and opportunities for utilising the Delphi method in the tourism sector by examining the applicability of the method in data collection and customer involvement for different purposes in new service development (NSD). This is done by introducing an NSD case aiming to find and evaluate ideas for nature tourism products. Data was collected by using two Delphi rounds and the suitability of the method was evaluated for selected criteria and describing the type of information that was gained during the process. The results show that the Delphi method suites customer involvement in the front-end stages of NSD well and the data collected provides rich information especially for service concept and service system development.