What Do Superyacht Guests Want?

This chapter investigates how hospitality interactions occur on luxury yachts and considers how the participants (guests and crew) who are involved in hospitality transactions react to the specific spatial and temporal conditions of the luxury yacht context. The critical question of what do customers want is addressed through the lens of van Manen’s (Researching lived experience. Routledge, 2016) lifeworld existentials of time, space, embodiment and relationships. Drawing on lived experiences on board a luxury yacht, the approach of phenomenological enquiry assists with reflective investigation to focus on what is being experienced, and how individuals are involved. The narrative is analysed using Pine and Gilmore’s (Harvard Business Review 76:97–105, 1998; The experience economy. Harvard Business School Press, 1999) 4Es of co-creation experiences: Education, Entertainment, Esthetics/Aesthetics, Escapism in search of emerging patterns of customer–crew interactions in co-creating the luxury hospitality experience. The chapter addresses the issue of relevance of the selected analytical tools in understanding luxury hospitality in the twenty-first century.