BU Research Blog

School of Tourism’s Ivana Rihova – a PhD Student at the John Kent Institute in Tourism – certainly experienced what ‘getting stuck in’ with fieldwork can feel like at this year’s summer festivals. As part of her research project entitled “Consumers as producers: customer-to-customer co-creation in the context of festival experiences” Ivana is visiting five multi-day outdoor festivals in England and Wales this summer. Through participant observation and interviews with festival goers she aims to explore how value is co-created in the context of festival participants’ social practices and experiences. Ivana’s research, supervised by Prof. Dimitrios Buhalis, Dr. Miguel Moital and Dr. Mary Beth Gouthro (all based at the School of Tourism), highlights various issues related to customer co-creation in socially dense festival contexts. The findings will not only contribute theoretically to our understanding of how people co-create value with each other, but could also help turn event and festival experiences from the ordinary to the extraordinary.