Co-creating Value with Millennials: A Case Study of Millennials' Co-created Experiences with Airfare aggregators

Abstract

Background:The complexity in delivering value on the global market, combined with the intensified competition for airfare aggregators, provides challenges and implies a need to uncover novel sources of delivering value to millennials, the future dominant generation of travelers.

Purpose:To examine how airfare aggregators should co-create value with millennials.

Theory: The theoretical perspectives employed in the dissertation are:co-creation;co-destruction;innovation; and service-dominant logic.
Method: The dissertation is an inductive case study inspired by grounded theory. The empirical data was gathered from three focus group discussions and subsequently analyzed in accordance with grounded theory.

Findings and conclusions: We present a final framework built on the elements:customer motivation; customer-firm interaction; and customer engagement.We consider the final framework to bea suitable tool for airfare aggregators to apply in order to facilitate value co-creation, and avoid value co-destruction,with millennials.

Implications: In order to co-create value with millennials, airfare aggregators should consider:providing extrinsic motivators; creating a fast and simple customer-firm interaction environment; applying co-production and co-development; and aligning service expectations. Lastly, we encourage future research on the topic to strengthen the generalizability of the findings.