Abstract:Evaluating the quality of tourism experience is crucial both for tourists' assessment of their travel experiences and for the tourism industry's enhancement of service quality. This paper first investigates the core essence of tourists' embodied experience quality based on the theory of embodiment. The construct of embodied tourism experience quality is defined as the extent of emotional and affective perceptions that tourists can acquire through their "phenomenal body" within a specifically organized tourism scene. The manifestations include the tourist's body, tourism scenes, and the interaction level between them. We employ a rigorous scale development process that includes theoretical deduction, content analysis, focus group interviews, and surveys to create a reliable and valid scale for measuring tourists' embodied experience quality. The scale comprises 21 items encompassing six specific dimensions: intensified sense experience, cross-modal sensory experience, and overall physical experience at the physical level; embodied awareness of the tourism scene at the scene organization level; surprising delight, and emotional sublimation at the emotional level. The tourism scene level of embodied tourism experience quality indicates the invisible power of contexts that attract and encourage tourists' physical and sensorial participations into the tourism related activities by virtue of concrete facilities, clues or elements placed in the scene. The emotional level of embodied tourism experience quality mainly emphasizes an ideal tourist-tourism scene interaction status such as the surprising delight mood and the emotion sublimation. The surprising delight mood corresponds with immersed pleasant emotions such as pleasure, flow, and peak experience, while the emotion sublimation usually comes with spiritual or internal transformations after enduring great physical challenges.