The relationship between tourist’s characteristics and tourist’s behavior and the perceived experience of visiting an art city: evidence from Italy

Tourists look for positive and memorable experiences and the experiential factor plays an incremental role in their customer experience (Holbrook and Hirschman, 1982; Volo, 2009; Walls et al. 2011; Neuhofer et al., 2014; Forlani et al., 2018). Even tourists who visit art cities and cultural heritage sites do not search only cognitive but also emotional and holistic experiences (Falk and Dierking, 1992; Bourgeon-Renault, 2000; Di Pietro et al. 2015; Pencarelli et al., 2015; 2017; Conti et al., 2017). Measurement of tourist experience has not yet been assigned the appropriate attention in the literature (Adhikari and Bhattacharya, 2016) even though it is fundamental to create value for tourists and cities. The aim of the paper is to identify the relationship between tourist’s characteristics and behavior and the visiting experience of visiting an art city. This study shows that the perception of the experience of visiting Urbino goes beyond the personal and behavioral differences.