04. visitor attraction market

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Visitor attraction market

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Page 1: 04. Visitor Attraction Market

Visitor attraction market

Page 2: 04. Visitor Attraction Market

Introduction

The factor that determines whether or not an attraction is successful is how the market responds to the product it offers.

It is vital for attraction developers and managers to understand the market for attractions.

Not as easy as it sounds Hierarchy of attraction markets is a useful tool

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Hierarchy of attraction markets

Whole population(the potential market)

Proportion of the population that visits attractions

of any kind

The markets for particular types of attraction, e.g.

museums, theme parks, …

Market subgroups such as elderly, visitors with

special needs

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Introduction (cont.)

This model is clearly an oversimplification of the situation. E.g. What population are we talking about? That of the local area, or region, the country, the whole world?

We know that for some attractions visitors from other countries are a very important part of the market, while others hardly ever see a foreigner.

The same is true when we go to the next level in the hierarchy.

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The Nature of Demand

As with most products the demand for attractions can be split into 4 main types

Effective demand

Deferred

Suppressed demand

Potential

No demand at all

Page 6: 04. Visitor Attraction Market

The Nature of Demand

Effective demand = people who want to visit attractions and do visit attractions

Suppressed demand = people who are not currently visiting attractions, but would like to do. There are 2 subs: deferred demand, there is a problem on the supply side; potential demand, there is a problem on the demand side.

No demand at all = no desire to visit, very difficult for management to try to convert these people into users

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Motivators and Determinants

This concept looks at why people do what they do

Motivators are those factors which make people want to visit attractions

Determinants are those factors which determine whether somebody will be able to visit an attraction at all and if they can visit, what type of attraction they will visit and what kind of visit it will be

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Motivators

Motivators will vary from person to person and will be different for different types of attraction

Theme park Opera Free Museum Health farm

Excitement Status Education Health

Fun Extraordinary nature

Easy access Escape from routine

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Motivators

It is too easy to exaggerate the differences between motivators

Ultimately all people visit attractions for enjoyment

Most people find it difficult to articulate what their motivations are

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Determinants

There are 2 types; those that dictate whether people can visit or not, and those that determine the types of trip that will be made and the type of attraction that will be visited (see table 4.2 p 71)

Determinants of whether or not any visit can be or will be made

Determinants of the type of attraction and the type of trip

State of health State of health

Disposable income Disposable income

Real or perceived leisure time Real or perceived leisure time

Commitments to family Commitments to family

Fear of travel Fear of particular mode of tansport

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Determinants

It is possible to further divide determinants into: Personal determinants such as personal

circumstances, personal experiences, … External determinants such as views of

friends and relatives, the media, … Determinants are very personal and

can sometimes be removed

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Individual decision-making

While the table 4.1 p. 72 is useful model, it is generalized and is based on the idea that people always behave in a rational manner. In fact, people do not behave rationally; their behavior is tempered by their perceptions and prejudices, and influenced by the level and type of information they have

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Decision-making and theme parks

In general, we know little about how people make decisions whether or not to visit attractions

McClung has done some interesting research (2000), specifically to theme parks. He concluded that the 4 most important factors were: Climate Preference for particular types of theme parks Their children’s desire to visit Cost

See tables 4.3 and 4.4 on p. 73 This research was conducted in the US and it would

be interesting to see if different results could be obtained in Europe or Asia

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Decision-making and museums

Research was published in 2001, by MORI and the Council for Museums, Galleries and Libraries which looked at attitudes of people in the UK (see table 4.5 p. 74)

It went on to look at the reasons why people chose NOT to visit (see figure 4.4 p. 74)

Even more interesting were the results of the survey of children (see figure 4.5 p. 75)

The research went on to indentify the things that would make young people visit museums more (table 4.6 p. 76)

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Market segmentation and the visitor attraction market

One way of trying to deal with the complexity of the attraction market and to look at the market in a way which is helpful for marketing is the technique of market segmentation

There are 4 classic ways of segmentation: Geographical Demographics Psychographic Behavioristic

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Geographical Segmentation

The main criterion is where the people within the market live. This is because the market for attractions tends to be related to a defined catchment area.

However, if one just considers the place of permanent residence of visitors a false place of the market may emerge. This means that marketers must often target these people not where they live but in the place they are staying

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Demographic Segmentation

This kind of segmentation is well established in the tourism industry and the attractions specifically. For example, museums are seen as being for older people while theme parks are for the young.

Figure 4.6 p. 78 is clearly an oversimplification and is in many ways outdated. Yet, the planning and marketing of many attractions often appears to be based on this model

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Demographic Segmentation

Just a few points to illustrate how it is no longer a true reflection of society:

Children are maturing more quickly and become more independent at an early age

Many people never become part of a couple and many couples do not have children

A large portion of families are single-parent families The model does not take into account the extended family,

which is important with some ethnic minorities It is wrong to assume that elderly people are poor and

have health problems

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Demographic Segmentation

However, there is another way in which this model is unsuitable for attractions and that is that much attraction-visiting is not based on the family group.

While much attention has focused on demographic variables such as age, sex and family situation, relatively little attention has been focused on other important variables such as race, religion, language and nationality

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Psychographic Segmentation

This method is based on the idea that is the attitudes or opinions of individuals which dictate their behavior as consumers

This method works on the basis that attitudes and opinions come from 2 main sources: Lifestyle personality

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Lifestyle

This approach gained ground in the 1980s with the recognition of ‘designer lifestyles’

Lifestyle is a matter of how individuals live, how they see themselves and how they want others to see them

Lifestyles result from the combination of many factors including; education, occupation, income and social contacts

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Personality

Individuals can be segmented on the basis of shared personality traits which influence their decisions as consumers. For example, it is more likely that one will find adventurous people bungee-jumping and that a higher portion of people at theme parks will be extroverts than you might find in a museum.

Nevertheless, this is not only a gross stereotype but it also implies that all people choose for themselves which attraction they visit, which is often not true

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Behaviouristic Segmentation

This method of segmentation groups people according to their relationship with a particular product such as a specific attraction or type of attraction. This covers a number of variations, some are listed here: Purchase occasions: whether or not the people buy the

product regularly or occasionally or never Benefits sought: what are people hoping to gain from

visiting User status: people are non-users, ex-users, potential

users, regular users, or first-time users

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Behaviouristic Segmentation

Readiness stage: are people unaware of the product, aware and interested, desirous of visiting, or actually intent on visiting?

Attitude to the product: identifying people who are enthusiastic or positive about the attraction or merely indifferent, and those who are negative or downright hostile to it

Loyalty to the product: whether people feel a loyalty towards the attraction or would be happily go somewhere else, if it was cheaper or looked more exciting

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Other methods of segmentation

Visit party composition: this approach argues that behavior is often related to the composition of the visit party and that, therefore, the market should be segmented on the basis of whether people visit as individuals, families, or groups

Visit type and purpose: here the market is split into groups of particular type, such as school parties and corporate hospitality clients

Method of travel: this divides the market in relation to how people travel to the attraction

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Other methods of segmentation

In the end, the fact is that no one method is satisfactory on its own. It is only when 2, 3, or more are combined and blended on an appropriate way that an accurate picture can be compiled

Furthermore, it is important to recognize that segmentation is carried out to help improve the effectiveness of marketing activity

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Segmentation and the theme park market

Little research has been done One exception to this is the work of Fodness

and Milner (2000), which used a perceptual mapping approach to segmenting the theme park market, based on parks in Florida

The researchers established 3 separate ‘clusters’ of theme park visitors

It is clear from the results in tables 4.7 p. 82 and 4.8 p. 83 that different segments or ‘clusters’ do have different patterns of behavior

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The leisure paradox

Attraction visiting involves time and money, so the concept of the leisure paradox, as illustrated in figure 4.7 p83, is highly relevant to the attractions market. This model implies that the ability to pay, and the amount of time people have available to visit varies greatly with stages in the family life cycle

Figure 4.8 p. 84 shows that available time also varies between men and women and between retired, employed, and unemployed people

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Participation levels in the attractions market

Not everyone visits attractions, especially elderly. Families and young adults are perhaps the groups with the greatest participation levels in the market

MORI poll research (March 2001) indicated that in the 12 months from November/December 1998 to November/December 1999, 20% of people visited no attractions of any kind. Of those who did visit, the cinema was the most popular. The most popular forms of visitor attractions were: Museums 8% Stately home or castle 28% Theme park 25% Wildlife park 23%

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Frequency of attraction-visiting

Most adults in developing countries take leisure day trips. Data in May 2001 showed that 85% of adults in the UK had taken such a trip. It was estimated that 5.9 billion such day trips were taken in the UK in the same year.

Most of these day trips are not to visitor attractions. Most represent trips to restaurants, friends, shopping, walking, swimming, or visits to cinemas

Visits to actual attractions are an ‘out of the ordinary’ activity and will rarely take place more than once a month

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Frequency of attraction-visiting

Participation levels and frequency of visits does vary between countries and cultures with Japan and the US being above the UK average, countries in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa are below the UK average

Page (2000) suggests that visits per capita to theme parks vary between regions of the world, as follows: US 0.6 Japan 0.6 Australia 0.5 Europe 0.2

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The International attractions market

Currently, we cannot present a comprehensive view of the worldwide attractions market because: Different countries still define attractions in different ways

to each other Some countries do not appear to collect data

systematically When data are published they are often already 2 or 3

years out of date An attempt will be made to produce some

meaningful comments on the situation in Europe, North America, Japan and Australia

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The attractions market in European Cities

Most European cities have well-established attractions, although they vary greatly depending on the nature of the city and its history

Table 4.9 p. 86 identifies the top attractions in 6 European cities

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The attractions market in North American cities

North America is often seen as the home of the attractions business, the place from which most new ideas originate

Most North American cities have a wide variety of attractions as we can se from table 4.10 p. 87

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The attractions market in Japan

Japanese people love visiting attractions and the country has the world’s most visited attraction – Tokyo Disneyland – which received 17.5 million visitors in 1999

Table 4.11 p. 88 shows the number of visitors to attractions in the Tokyo area alone

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The attractions market in Australia

The attractions sector varies greatly between cities as can be seen from table 4.12 p. 88

Because of different bases it is difficult to compare, but we can see variations between cities with gambling and shopping being key attractions in Melbourne, nature topping the list in Perth, and shopping and a single building being the most popular in Sydney

There are also differences in Australia between domestic and international tourists (see table 4.13 p. 89)

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The UK attractions market

In 1999, there were about 404 million visits to attractions, with a total spending of around £ 1,400 million

As we can see from figure 4.9 p. 89, this overall figure masked variations between different types of attraction

In the 10 years from 1989 to 1999, attraction visiting rose by 11% in the UK as a whole

Over the same decade, the change in attendance at different types of attractions ranged from a fall of 6% for wildlife attractions to a rise of 11% for museums and galleries, and of 76% for farm attractions

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The UK attractions market

Within the UK, the geographical distribution of attraction visits in 1999 is illustrated in table 4.14 p. 90

From the table it is clear that attraction visiting is spread very unevenly around the UK with London dominating the market

The top 3 destinations in 1999 were: Westminster, London 22,279,499 Blackpool 9,619,308 Edinburgh 7,619,012

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The UK attractions market

While the UK has no true ‘mega-attraction’, it does have a number of major attractions, the top 20 are listed in table 4.15 p. 91

In the UK 16% of attraction visitors are overseas tourists, but in London they represent 44% of visits

Around 31% of all visitors to attractions in 1999 were undertaken by children. 46% of all visits to farm attractions being made by children but only 17% of garden visits

Some of the differences for 6 types of attraction in 1999 are outlined in table 4.16 p. 92

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The market for different types of attractions

Different types of attractions have very different markets

Theme parks: Table 4.17 p. 93 lists the top 20

amusement/theme parks in the world The dominance of the US is clear. However, the

recent growing interest in theme parks in Asia is shown in the fact that 6 of them are in Asia. Interestingly, while Europe dominates the international tourism market it has only 2 attractions in the top 20

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The market for different types of attractions

Every American visits an amusement/theme park at least once a year (see table 4.18 p. 93)

McClung published interesting research (2000) outlining the demographic profile of theme parks visitors in the US. Here are some of the results: Frequency to visit theme parks was high in the 24-44

age group but low in the 45+ segment Families with children are much more likely to visit

theme parks than those without children Theme park visitors were rather higher earners than

the non-visitors

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The market for different types of attractions

In 1999 Wong and Cheung published a study of the amusement/theme park market in Asia. Their research focused on Hong Kong, and covered visits by Hong Kong people to both Asian and American theme parks (see table 4.19 p. 94)

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The market for different types of attractions

Industrial tourism: Stevens looked (2000) at industrial tourism. This

field covers a variety of types of attraction. E.g. it has been estimated that in France some 5500 industrial sites are open to visitors, with around 10 million visitors per year. Table 4.20 p. 95 lists a number of the world’s most popular industrial tourism attractions

Most industrial tourism attractions are on a smaller scale than those shown in table 4.20

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The market for different types of attractions

Industrial sites have 1 or more of the following characteristics: Famous brands Products which are made in a traditional way Places where the visitor can buy the product at a

better price Exclusive, luxury high-status products such as

champagne and perfume Products were production process involves high levels

of skill Controversial sites such as nuclear power stations Very large-scale production such as steel plants Sites with a high public profile such as airports

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Cross-cultural differences in attraction-visiting

As the tourism market becomes more internationalized, the issue of cross-cultural differences in tourism behavior assumes ever greater significance.

Little research has been conducted It would be interesting to see how the preferences

for different themes at theme parks identified by Wong and Cheung compare to those of European or American tourists

We look at 3 examples of cross-cultural differences that have been researched

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Cross-cultural differences in attraction-visiting

Kau (2000) published an excellent piece of research towards the Tang Dynasty Village in Singapore, although the field research data are now rather old. The research involved 639 Asian tourists and 379 Caucasian tourists. Before looking at the Village, respondents were asked which Singapore attractions they enjoyed the most. The results are shown in table 4.21 p. 96

Tables 4.22 an 4.23 p. 96 indicate relatively small differences between the 2 ethnic groups

There were differences in terms of their levels of interest in different planned attractions (see table 4.24 p. 97)

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Cross-cultural differences in attraction-visiting

Vittersø (2000) looked at the differences in attitudes to 6 Norwegian attractions by different groups of European visitors

Figure 4.10 p. 98 shows the attitudes to the Norwegian Glacier Museum. Clearly, the Germans found the attractions more challenging that the others

In 2001, Joppe, Martin and Waalen published a survey of the satisfaction levels of Canadian, American and other nationalities of tourists with Toronto as a destination (see table 4.27 p. 99)

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Cross-cultural differences in attraction-visiting

The conclusion appears to be that Canadians, Americans and other nationalities are similar in their views

It would be interesting to see more research conducted. The following issues should be looked at: Propensity per head to visit attractions Preferred types of attractions Ability and willingness to pay to visit attractions Level of willingness and desire to spend money at

attractions on catering and merchandise Attitudes towards, and expectations of, customer service Nature of the visiting groups …

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Gender and attraction-visiting

The tourism industry is rife with stereotypes about gender differences in tourist behavior. E.g. men play golf, while women shop. How accurate is this picture?

Research on gender differences is underdeveloped but even less work has been done specifically on gender and attraction-visiting

There are a few interesting examples of research such as a survey conducted by Frey and Shaw in Australia. 54% of their respondents were women and the result is shown in table 4.28 p. 100

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Gender and attraction-visiting

It is clear that there are differences in actual attraction visiting between men and women. However, these results may not tell the whole story because: Personality also affects behavior Visiting is not the same as enjoyment and

satisfaction There are cross-cultural differences in the

position of women in general

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The future of the attractions market

The future of the attractions market globally and in particular countries will be shaped by a range of factors: The volume and nature of supply The rate of growth of domestic and international

tourism The economic situation globally and in particular

countries Changes in lifestyles and general consumer

behavior

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The future of the attractions market

The 2 main questions relating to the future attractions market are: How large will it be? What types of attractions will receive most

visitors? It seems that the overall volume of

attraction-visiting worldwide will continue to grow. However, the growth will not take place in the US and UK, but in Asia and Australasia. Growth will also be seen in South America, the Middle East and Africa

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The future of the attractions market

Suggested types of attractions that will grow:

Attractions which offer hands-on experiences of all kinds Attractions which focus on health Workplace visits Leisure shopping Fantasy attractions Attractions which allow visitors to learn something new Places which provide intense experiences Attractions which incorporate accommodation

A decline in attractions based on live animals

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The future of the attractions market

Other developments: The market for individual attractions will become

more international and culturally diverse Visitors will demand higher standards of service

and facilities More and more attractions will focus on

particular market segments Many attractions will boost their market by

hosting more and more special events and features

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Conclusions

We have looked at the concept of demand and consumer behavior in the attraction field

We also have looked at the size and nature of the attraction market in a number of countries

We tried to predict how the attractions market may develop in the future