The passenger airline industry is worth $623 billion, transporting around 3,530 million passengers a year (IATA, 2015). Although useful, most prior research focuses only on specific situations and on a minority of passengers, and takes a producercentric view which conceptualizes consumers as the target of airline activities (Reisinger and Movondo, 2005, Wangenheim and Bayón, 2007, Folkes et al., 1987, Bejou and Palmer, 1998). Instead, we focus on a characteristic of airline travel that affects all airline consumers: confinement. Airline consumers are often confronted with restrictions in terms of space and activity which can lead to discomfort, frustration, dissatisfaction, and reduced well-being. The objectives of this study are therefore to: 1) Define the concept of consumer confinement, 2) Develop a model showing how the problems faced in confined contexts, solution strategies used to deal with these, moderators and outcomes are related, 3) Show how confined airline experiences can be managed more effectively to improve consumer and company outcomes. In understanding how companies and consumers play a role in avoiding and reducing these, we investigate how consumers become problem solvers and deal with confinement using a thematic analysis of blogs and forums. Our study shows that long-haul travellers face a wide range of problems and have developed inventive, personalized solution strategies to address these. We also develop a conceptual model which identifies the problems faced by consumers such as boredom and not looking good; moderators such as propensity to plan and claustrophobia; potential confinement solution strategies consumers and companies can action, such as talking with other passengers and watching movies; and how these may affect company and consumer outcomes such consumer emotions, satisfaction and loyalty. The paper contributes to theory development in marketing by conceptualizing confinement, which has received very limited attention in prior work (see Chen, Gerstner, and Yinghui, 2009 for an exception). Second, we build on prior work on negative service experiences, such as the effect of overbooking service capacity (Wangenheim and Bayón, 2007) and service failure (Folkes, Koletsky, and Graham, 1987) that took a more producer-centric view, conceptualizing consumers as the recipient of the company’s activities. We extend and go beyond this work by showing that consumers are actually active co-solvers of their consumption experience problems (Prahalad and Ramaswamy, 2004). Third, our conceptual model provides theoretical relationships between confinement and company as well as consumer outcomes such as satisfaction, emotions and loyalty to show how effective strategies are used to help consumers reduce the problems caused by confined situations. Fourthwe contribute to an understanding of the boundary conditions of when strategies work by showing that in particular, individual differences such as fear of flying could have an effect on the effectiveness of strategies. Fifth, we complement the travel medicine and the general travel literature which has researched travel risk and anxiety (Reisinger and Movondo, 2005) and physical health problems resulting from flying phobias (McIntosh et al., 1998), with a focus on the more common problems and strategies used by the large majority of long-haul flyers to occupy time and improve emotional well-being. We conclude with suggestions for further research.

The events industry continues to grow and is estimated to be worth around 30 billion dollars yearly involving more than 50 million trips worldwide. MICE (meetings, incentives, conferencing, exhibitions) offer opportunities for business networking, business development and customer loyalty, and are used for internal company purposes as well as for external commercial gain. However, capturing the value of any given MICE appears difficult and relatively little is known about how customers engage in co-creation and there are few models or frameworks. Moreover, dyadic encounter and value from a provider perspective ignore the measurement of customer value in multi-actor service encounters. The research questions posed by this study were therefore: How do multi-actor service encounters differ from dyadic ones? Do current value frameworks capture all the value created in these encounters? And how can multi-actor service providers increase customer value? To address these questions, we embarked on a qualitative study with 35 actors (attendees, organizers, speakers) from networking events, using a service-dominant logic approach to conceptualizing customer perceived value from networking events. To the best of our knowledge, this is one of the first empirical studies to address the joint creation of value in service encounters characterised by multiple providers (provider network approach) and multiple customers (customer group approach) at the same time and studied from the perspectives of both sides. In answering our first research question of how do multi-actor service encounters different from dyadic ones, we first identify several characteristics that define multi-actor services and compare them to traditional one-to-one services. Our second research question asked whether current value taxonomies capture all the value created in these encounters and we conceptualised the dimensions of event value (social, professional, learning, emotional and hedonic), and show how these relate to existing value taxonomies, as well as highlighting professional value which is new and novel to event encounters. Thirdly, in answering how multi-actor service providers can increase customer value, we supplement previous research on customer value from the providers’ view by adding how the design and execution of service impacts customer value. From this managerial perspective, our study brings new perspectives for event management in understanding when and where value is created and therefore when and how it should be measured. In terms of assessing interaction and engagement, we have found that few practices are in place. We suggest that observation within an event setting could be complemented by video recording.