b

“Awesome ” is arguably one of the most highly desirable experiential accolade for both tourists and the providers of those experiences. To achieve this accolade, a tourist product or place must be able to make tourists feel the emotion of awe. Both for commercial tourist marketing purposes and for the analysis of tourism experience, the ability to understand and measure awe is an important yet currently under-researched field. In fact, Holbrook and Hirschman (1982) and Faullant et al. (2011) warn that attendant research in the service literature, including tourism studies, often focus only on higher-order dimensions (pleasure-arousal, negative-positive), believed to influence satisfaction, post-visit behaviour, intentions and attitudes, with little attention paid to the full range of affective states described by Russel (1980) and others (e.g. Johnson-Laird & Oatley, 1989; Otto & Ritchie, 1996). Here, we set out to establish a framework for the analysis of awe in tourism and identify some of its key components of particular relevance to tourism experiences. Whilst not included as one of Eckman’s (1992) basic emotions, awe is considered to be a “foundational human experience that defines the human existence ” (Schneider, 2011, p.249) 2 and is pan-cultural in its expression (Konečni, 2005). Awe is elicited through a sense of perceptual vastness and requires cognitive accommodation as one’s personal schema is modified to fit novel, unfamiliar information (Keltner & Haidt, 2003). It remains poorly studied despite its potentially transformative and schema-changing effects (Keltner & Haidt