JAMES WALLMAN, WORLD EXPERIENCE ORGANISATION PRAISES ‘THE SPARK & THE SENSE OF WONDER
In tourism, “innovation” has too often meant digitisation – another app, another filter, another frictionless transaction.
Yet what travellers increasingly crave is not efficiency, but emotion. Across research from the University of California to the London School of Economics, evidence now shows that emotions of awe and wonder not only heighten attention and memory, but also make people more generous, curious and connected.
And emotion doesn’t only matter to tourists and travel brands. As The Long And The Short Of It – Binet and Field’s study of 25 years of advertising – proved, emotion is one of the two key ingredients to build brands and drive long-term brand and business success. (The other is fame.)
For experience designers, this is more than sentiment. It’s strategy.
Awe increases recall and loyalty. Destinations that evoke it – from Killa Design’s Museum of the Future in Dubai to Meow Wolf’s House of Eternal Return in Santa Fe – create memories that last longer and inspire repeat visits.
Wonder broadens perspective. Research into “psychogeography” reveals how wandering through space shapes perception, empathy and sense of place.
Authenticity drives trust. Today’s travellers reward encounters that feel human, local and real – not polished to perfection.
At a time when the Experience Economy risks being swallowed by a stalking Digital Economy, the call to slow down, connect and care has never felt more relevant.
Terry Stevens: A Wonderful Spark and Manifesto
Enter Professor Terry Stevens, international tourism consultant and author of The Spark & a Sense of Wonder, who shared his ideas and ideals at one of the most warmly received WXO Campfires of the year – held twice for audiences across Europe and America, with the second session broadcast live to delegates at IMEX Las Vegas.
Tourism, Terry says, is at a turning point.
“The next ten to fifteen years will be a period of unprecedented experimentation. Old formulas will no longer hold true. Hybrid thinkers with hybrid solutions will prove the winners.”
Through stories drawn from fifty-five countries and half a century of practice, Stevens says that rather than relying on technology or scale, the future of successful tourism lies in curiosity, authenticity and community. In experiences that are grounded in the geography of the location as much as the mindset of the professionals involved.
“Tomorrow’s tourists care,” he said. “They care about the places they visit, they care about the environment, and they will care deeply about the stories you communicate with them.”
The implications and opportunities for experience creators is huge – from how technology is used to the value of storytelling to the power of experience design.
“The Odyssey of the human spirit…. Men require of their neighbours something sufficiently akin to be understood, something sufficiently different to provoke attention, and something great enough to command admiration.” – T. S. Eliot, Towards a Definition of Culture (1945)
Here are nine takeaways from a Campfire that was as enjoyable as it was insightful.
7. Awareness Is A Discipline
Stevens believes that learning about how to create a meaningful travel experience begins with awareness. However, this is no simple marketing tactic. It is a necessary discipline. The ability to slow down and perceive what is present in a landscape or community is fundamental to understanding the essence of the travel experience you’re trying to create.
He draws inspiration from the U.S. National Park Service interpreter Freeman Tilden, whose 1957 book Interpreting Our Heritage urged communicators to provoke curiosity by connecting information to personal experience.
“Put there just a spark. If there is some good inflammable stuff, it will catch fire.” – Interpreting Our Heritage (Freeman Tilden, 1957)
In Stevens’s home village of East Coker in Somerset, for instance, he has helped to restore a nineteenth-century rope-making works. Visitors are invited to see the machinery, eat food cooked by local residents and share conversation at communal tables. The result, he says, is modest but profound: simple, shared activities can bring joy and tell stories that matter across generations.
This deceptively unassuming level of connection is the foundation of the empathy required to create a meaningful experience.
6. Psychogeography: The Designed Pause and the Unplanned Walk
For Stevens, wonder is not a childish reaction but a cognitive state. It is the moment when observation becomes reflection. He quotes Van Morrison’s lyric from A Sense of Wonder’s self-titled track – “Didn’t I come to bring you a sense of wonder?” – turning a wistful question into a professional yet mindful reminder.
In tourism, the tendency is to fill every gap in an itinerary. Stevens instead calls for designed pauses – moments that allow visitors to stop, look and think, welcoming in the wonder Morrison sang of. This connects directly to the idea of the flâneur or the dérive.
Originated in 19th-century Paris and embodied by people like Charles Baudelaire, a flâneur is a 19th-century urban stroller who observes society. The dérive is a 20th-century Situationist practice of drifting through the city to explore its effects on both emotions or behaviour. These are both living examples of something called psychogeography.
Psychogeography is the study of how geographical environments affect emotions and behavior, often by using methods like aimless wandering or the dérive to explore urban and rural spaces. First coined by Guy Debord in the 1950s, psychogeography is “the study of the specific effects of the geographic environment (organised or not) on the emotional behaviour of the individual.”
Stevens believes that tourism is at its most powerful at psychogeography’s intersection of psychology and geography, using it as a method of gentle engagement: encouraging exploration, wandering, slowing down, and meeting people.
He encourages travellers and tourists to rediscover this principle through small experiments. Here’s one from fêted travel author Robert Macfarlane: put a glass on a map, draw a circle around it, and explore only within this boundary. Macfarlane’s glass-on-a-map is an excellent way to slow down, replacing the pursuit of distance with the practice of depth.
5. Rituals Resonate Over Spectacle
Many of the examples Stevens used to illustrate his theories have a key ingredient in common – adding more effects does not also add more meaning. (Perhaps the opposite may be true?)
He points to the Bell of the Fallen in Rovereto, Italy. It is a large metal bell, forged from melted cannons sent by former nations at war. It rings each evening as a civic ritual and visitor experience. The message of this deceptively simple act resonates a message of reconciliation more powerfully than any multimedia display.
In an era where immersive technology is too often used as the default solution to any need for deeper communication, Stevens’s example reminds us that meaning does not always require artificial amplification.
4. First, Measure
Stevens shared his ‘Model Of Destination Management Competency’ – a benchmarking report that distils findings from monitoring 200 destinations around the world to measure success (in terms of visitor numbers, spend etc).
When Stevens plotted each destination’s scores across set criteria as a series of lines, the pattern was the same for leaders and laggards alike – shared peaks and troughs.
The common weakness that hobbles a location’s success, according to Stevens’ reading of the model, is clearly “under‑investing in visitor experiences.”
Many places, Stevens says, “do their marketing well”. They build infrastructure and show up at trade fairs to promote their cities and countries. However “what they don’t do is create networks of hybrid thinkers to deliver great experiences.”
Stevens is clear that the tourism industry is in transition.
“The next 10–15 years… will be a time of unprecedented experimentation,” he said. Old formulas will not hold. Hybrid thinking, new partnerships and new operating models will be needed.
For instance, Cap a Mar in Barcelona. Local fishing families who had previously been displaced by marina development had launched a series of first-person walking tours of the old yards and dock. A hard reality has been somehow transformed into part of the fishing community’s economic future.
Stevens shared another rigorous example of measurement in tourism: Slovenia’s Unique Experiences, a national accreditation system with 10 set criteria that experiences were graded against. They are:
Local identity
Authentic
Unique
Experiential
Green
Boutique
Premium
Added value
Off-season
Top digital experience
Gastronomy
Sustainable mobility
Eco certificates
Off-season
Based on field evaluation, those experiences that achieved an average grade of eight or more were seen to be those that were contributing most to fulfilling the promise of making Slovenia a green and premium destination.
Each of the experiences that achieved this hallowed ‘8 or above’ were experiences rooted in local identity and told in human voices.
“Simplicity, community and engagement,” Stevens said. “Maybe that’s the real alchemy.”
3. Next, Practice Alchemy
The metaphor of alchemy is one that runs throughout Stevens’s presentation. In his view, the most meaningful – and ultimately successful – travel destinations are those that combine art and a little science to produce transformation.
His curated collection of experiences range widely:
Rural traditions & village walks, Bregenzerwald, Austria – community‑led encounters located throughout Vorarlberg, where villages built bus shelters to tell their local stories.
The Path of Perspectives above Innsbruck, Austria, where architectural viewpoints are inscribed with quotes from Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Combining local larch wood and the weathered Corten steel found in avalanche barriers, the blend of the metaphysical and the physical encourages philosophical reflection on the local landscape.
The Byrne Haaland Experience, Norway – a narrated audio walking tour that explores the hometown of footballer Erling Haaland in the town of Bryne, Jæren. This experience includes visiting his childhood and training locations, seeing street art related to him, and trying typical local foods he ate growing up there.
The Comedy Carpet in Blackpool, a 2,200-square-metre installation of jokes that has become both a local landmark that is not only ‘totally Blackpool’ but also a site for reminiscence therapy. Some jokes are printed so small you can only see them on your hands and knees, Others are so large you have to climb to the top of the Blackpool Tower to read them. It’s also good for mental health: in 2024, it was appropriated by the Dementia Society of Britain, because they found that “people were going there and their memories were being revived.”
2. Tech vs Touch?
So, what to do about technology, which is also, clearly, crucial for scale and communications in the future of travel? Technology, Stevens says, is not the enemy of authenticity.
“It’s never either-or,” he said. “Both must thrive and enhance each other.”
Digital platforms excel at discovery and access, while emotion tends to flow through human encounters. For travel destinations, the challenge is to use technology to facilitate such encounters, not replace them. Equally, experience designers must leave room for serendipity rather than programming every second.
1. From Moment to Movement: A Travel Manifesto
Stevens concluded with what he called a manifesto for meaningful tourism – “not a moment, but a movement”:
Great tourist experiences are often the antithesis of the digital.
There is a need to get back to basics.
Spontaneity, random acts of kindness & serendipity are vital ingredients
Freedom to explore, to wander, to become inquisitive is vital.
Happiness and pleasure are vital outcomes.
Inspiration and joy come from local interactions.
Accept that it is often a struggle to define the authentic.
Many experiences are reassuringly hard to find.
Nurture those tourists who care about the places they visit.
Welcome the fact that tourist behaviour is shifting from ‘nobody cares’ to ‘everybody cares’.
Destinations have a pulse and tourists need to feel that heartbeat.
Encourage visitors to walk and talk (with strangers).
“In a world increasingly enamoured with high‑tech attractions, the projects and people in this book stand as a testament to the power of simplicity, storytelling and human connection.” — Tim Rusby
What This Means for Experience Designers and Operators
Stevens’s manifesto is less a rejection of modern tourism than a clarion call to create not just fun, but meaningful experiences – and not for idealistic reasons but because this works for financial success too. The evidence from behavioural science, social geography, community practice and the many examples Stevens gave all point in the same direction: people seek meaning as much as they seek novelty. That’s what will get them talking, that’s what will get them to return. And he quoted his favourite marketing book, inspired by the psychedelic band the Grateful Dead.
“You cannot merely want to be considered just the best of the best. You want to be considered the only ones who do what you do.”– from Marketing Lessons from The Grateful Dead (Brian Halligan & David Meerman Scott, 2010)
For experience designers and operators, the implications are clear:
Build in pauses, viewpoints and unstructured time in your experiences.
Deploy digital tools for discovery, access and orientation, but keep the human encounter at the centre.
Treat visitor experiences as civic assets. Projects such as Rovereto’s Bell or Blackpool’s public art show that visitor experiences can also serve social reconciliation and pride of place.
Borrow from Slovenia’s model by assessing experiences on identity, sustainability and community value, not just footfall or revenue.
Depth and meaning don’t just matter for artistic reasons, they’re also commercial imperatives
Stevens closed his talk by again quoting Van Morrison – this time the song ‘Tore Down a la Rimbaud’. “You gave me ways and means and emotions / But most of all, you gave me knowledge of myself.”
Of course, the numbers matter. But perhaps we might also judge the experiences we create on another metric: as people depart our experience, did we in some way give them knowledge of themselves? (And, to swing this back to the numbers: aren’t meaningful experiences the ones you talk about to friends? So perhaps by aiming at this meaning metric, we might also increase word of mouth.)
