Tourism Destination Marketing

Part 2

Major Operations

1. Assessing the current market(s) and forecasting future ones

2. Auditing the destination and analysing its appeal to the markets

3. Developing strategic objectives and a marketing mix

4. Creating an organisation for implementing the objectives

5. Carrying them out and evaluating the results

Assessing markets

• Who are the visitors?

• Who will future visitors be?

• Why are they likely to come?

• What will they do?

Research

• Counts of all individuals entering or leaving the country

• Interviews at frontiers with a sample of those entering and departing

• Self-completion questionnaires

• Sample surveys of population of a country

• Accommodation nights and arrivals recorded by individual accommodation providers

Forecasting

• Exploratory forecasting: looking at past trends and projecting them into the future

• Speculative forecasting: qualitative approach, based on predictions made by informed experts

• Normative forecasting: tourism organisation sets targets eg. visitor numbers, expected revenue – then works out tactics to meet them

• Integrative forecasting: integrates the results from other forecasting methods

Forecasting

Forecasting is more art than science and

cannot be relegated to a mechanical data-

crunching activity. A forecaster needs to

become involved with the data to detect

changing patterns.

Geurts, 1982

Destination Life Cycle

• TALC

– Exploration

– Involvement

– Development

– Consolidation

– Stagnation

– Decline or rejuventation

Destination Auditing

• In order to ensure the destination capacity will cope with forecast visitors these questions need to be asked:

– What is there?

– What is thought to be there?

– What has been represented as being there?

What is there?

• Physical attractions

• Socio cultural resources

• Infrastructure

• Accommodation

What is thought to be there?

• Destination image

– Usually stereotyped

– Images are more differentiated and complex to previous visitors than non visitors

– Older established destinations images are more affected by non-promotional communication

– Word of mouth affects image more than most other influences

Destination Image cont.

• Well established images are hard to change and require heave investment to do so

• Its is often the media rather than advertising which most influences destination image

• Destination images may vary with different audiences

• Destination images vary inter-regionally

Destination Branding

• Difficult to do because:

– Not a homogenous product

– Destination marketers cannot set prices or control the distribution system, branding has to rely totally on promotion or publicity

– Difficult to make one brand appeal to all

Marketing Strategy

• Difficult to position a destination because the destination marketer does not have control over individual tourism businesses and products

• Need to target a variety of groups to a destination to ensure maximum visits

• Destination may mean different things to different groups of visitors

Marketing Mix

• Difficult as the destination marketer does not have control over the products within the destination nor with the associated prices and distribution

• The majority of destinations marketing input occurs in the promotion of the destination