This research investigates triggers of transformative tourism experiences and their circumstances through the lenses of existential philosophy. Drawing on descriptive phenomenological method, 10 narratives were gathered and analyzed for this purpose. We found that triggering episodes tend to occur at the end of travel, to evoke intense mixed emotions and heightened cognition, to engender the sense of transiency, demarcation, and connection to something grand. It furthermore appears that when triggers are co-created by tourists, an extraordinary experience is a result; transformative experience, however, occurs when triggers are also made sense of. We present a theoretical model that outlines transformative mechanisms of tourism experiences and discuss practical implication as related to tourism experience provision and destination marketing.
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