A few undeveloped thoughts:

When someone makes reservations for a packaged tour, score as -1

When it's for a major chain hotel or well-known all-included resort, 0

When it's for a small local inn or B&B, +1

Travel to major tourist destinations, score as 0 (I'm sure there is some place you can find out how many people visit a given country, city, etc.)

Travel to less popular destinations within popular countries, or less popular countries, score as +1

Add points for specific features such as making connections via local train or bus, the number of places included on an itinerary, the number of different sorts of activity included (e.g., art museum + concert tickets + white-water rafting + fly fishing = 4).

Hi Lukasz,

You might find the service design literature, and value-proposition development literature of interest here as the customer is meant to be at the centre of the design. You might need to adapt an employee creativity scale to capture this aspect

You also might find some of the following of interest:

Richards, G. and Wilson, J. (2006), "Developing creativity in tourist experiences: a solution to the serial reproduction of culture?", Tourism Management, Vol. 27 No. 6, pp. 1209-23.

Alam, I. (2002), "An exploratory investigation of user involvement in new service development", Academy of Marketing Science Journal, Vol. 30 No. 3, pp. 250-61.

Alonso, A.D., & Ogle, A. (2008). Exploring design among small hospitality and tourism operations. Journal of Retail and Leisure Property, 7(4), 325-337.

Amabile, T.M., Conti, R., Coon, H., Lazenby, J., & Herron, M. (1996). Assessing the work environment for creativity. Academy of Management Journal, 39(5), 1154-1184.

Hu, M.-L.M., Ou, T.-L., Chiou, H.-J., & Lin, L.-C. (2012). Effects of Social Exchange and Trust on Knowledge Sharing and Service Innovation. Social Behavior and Personality, 40(5), 783.

Horng, J.-S., Tsai, C.-Y., Liu, C.-H., & Chung, D.Y.-C. (2014). Measuring Employee's Creativity: A New Theoretical Model and Empirical Study for Tourism Industry. Asia Pacific Journal of Tourism Research, 1-21.

McAdam, R., & Keogh, W. (2004). Transitioning Towards Creativity and Innovation Measurement in SMEs. Creativity and Innovation Management, 13(2), 126-139.

Saunila, M., & Ukko, J. (2012). A conceptual framework for the measurement of innovation capability and its effects. Baltic Journal of Management, 7(4), 355-375.

Best of luck with your research!

J

I am agree with Jennifer that creativity could be developed from service design, and center design, which created by the staff 

We live in a world which is faced with several economic, environmental and social challenges. With the rise of experience economy & skilled consumption, tourism, like other economy sectors, ought to undergo major transformations. Creativity is much needed to ensure sustainability of tourism from the part of the host country & this includes monitoring (and not spying)how much creativity is there in the incoming tourists. Creative tourists usually visit a country for cultural, historical, and sight-seeing purposes. This type of tourists expects to receive quality services & high degree of hospitality. The host country can measure their impressions by easy-to-fill questionnaires upon their departure. Based on their responses, adaptations ought to follow. Due care must be taken into account. An American professor, after visiting a certain country, was obliged to pay 150 $ dollars in the airport (as departure fee!). He told me that the fee was unfair & he will never go to that country again. He did that.

Perhaps the Social Validation method would work.  It involves two phases. In the first you talk to people (tourists?) and obtain their ideas with open-ended survey questions. Then you find commonalities, probably concerning both good and bad experiences, and then you put those onto a new SV measure, with Likert response options, and administer it to new groups. Thus you have quantitative and reliable data but are focused on concepts and concerns that are meaningful to the actual "consumers." This method has been used for year with, for example, parents who are asked to judge the efficacy of behavior therapy with their children, or teachers judging students. I have used it several times with creativity as well.

I can send references if you like. My own are on my web site (www . markrunco . com).

I did not develop the method, however, but those who did are of course cited in my papers.

Hi Lukasz

I am agree that some times there is a challenge to make creativity, and there is an opportunity to get the success! as the restaurant under the sea, and water boom where the tourist just playing a water and lazy swimming on their leisure time.

Dear prof. Runco,

I find your idea very interesting and I would truly appreciate having a chance to explore it further. In my short scientific career I have never worked with this Social Validation method, so I would be very thankful for the list of references you mentioned.

Thank you in advance for your help.

Lukasz

Dear All :-)

Thank you for all your comments and ideas with regard to my question. I am truly grateful for all of them! I hope this discussion keep continue because I believe it has been very fruitful so far :-)

All the best,

Lukasz

One has to measure/operationalize these two "book ends" to the tourism experiential continuum:

• authenticity
• serial reproduction

Then achieve something between these two "book ends"- that is an intersected set to amount to something creative/innovative. Creativity and innovation is then a matter of "degrees of freedom" within this intersected set.

Lukasz,

Thank you for writing. Sorry for the delay! My wife and I are moving house to house and its taking all of my time.  You are in Stavanger?  I worked in Bergen as Adjunct Prof for many years! I love Norway.  As for Social Validation: I would be happy to discuss it. Maybe we should go to email? And I have some papers I can share.  Try me at runco @ uga edu      Best, Mark

Tourism and Travel creativity is a function of the diverse experience that can be packed densely in time and space.

Point of reference:

• Destination-wise:nation states, municipalities, islands that despite their small sizes (spatial constraint) are able to pack a punch in terms of tourism experiences. (e.g. Monarco and Bali). 
• Attraction-wise: a space that despite suffering from space-time compression is timeless, even iconic (e.g. St.Mark's Square and the Eiffel Tower)

Following..

Several good papers in the past few months have reported (1) that when using divergent thinking tests, computerized scoring methods allow an Originality score that (unlike the traditional scores) is reliable and independent of Fluency, and (2) that the criterion measure called Creative Activity & Accomplishment Check List can include subscales for Technological, Everyday, Political, and Moral Creativity.

Hello Prof Runco,

Thank you for your lucid update. Please, I want to ask if I may be able to get some scholarly references from you on divergent thinking tests and the Creativity Activity and Accomplishment Check List? I am quite driven by the subscales they measure.

Regards,

Samuel.