Travel counseling and recommender systems on the Internet have not yet become smart enough to fulfill the elementary functions a fastidious consumer may expect. The EU‐funded…
Abstract
Travel counseling and recommender systems on the Internet have not yet become smart enough to fulfill the elementary functions a fastidious consumer may expect. The EU‐funded project named DieToRecs (http://dietorecs.itc.it/) aims at improving recommender system functionality by incorporating relevant findings from tourist behavior research. The computational intelligence needed to optimize the user‐system encounter greatly depends on how far the user has advanced in his travel decision process. This report elaborates the levels of counseling intelligence, explores the basic marketing paradigm of matching the products/services desired and offered, and ponders on the consequences for devising a recommender or counseling system capable of learning.
The Tourism Knowledge Map is part of a larger project that develops a web portal entitled The Tourism Knowledge Base. On this web site the users will be offered comprehensive…
Abstract
The Tourism Knowledge Map is part of a larger project that develops a web portal entitled The Tourism Knowledge Base. On this web site the users will be offered comprehensive information about the organizations in Austria providing tourism education, research, and consulting services. The Knowledge Map assists the users in finding and optimizing a set of keywords for launching an efficient search operation in tourism‐centred databases accessible on the internet. The underlying method is the Self‐Organizing Map, one of the most widely accepted techniques of unsupervised learning. Three real‐world examples illustrate how a Knowledge Map may be constructed from the frequencies of keywords and their co‐occurrence in the abstracts of tourism‐related research papers, articles, and reports.
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Evolution of Micro‐Models. Unlike the overall development in consumer research, specialized modeling of tourist behavior mainly occurred on the aggregate level. Macroeconomic…
Abstract
Evolution of Micro‐Models. Unlike the overall development in consumer research, specialized modeling of tourist behavior mainly occurred on the aggregate level. Macroeconomic demand or gravity and trip‐generation models are well known among scholars of tourism (Archer 1976, Vanhove 1979) while the individual tourist decision process has not been a subject of great priority. Modeling on the disaggregate level apart from some exceptions in travel behavior and mode selection (Tybout and Hauser 1981; Barff, Mackay and Olshavsky 1982) rarely exceeds the standard technique of flow‐charting. Gallichan (1976) and Go (1981) offer typical examples of ad hoc defined stages in the tourist decision sequence.
Tourism benefits from increasing leisure — a reliable mechanism? Several scholars in tourism have been inspired by the end of the decade to engage in forecasting projects…
Abstract
Tourism benefits from increasing leisure — a reliable mechanism? Several scholars in tourism have been inspired by the end of the decade to engage in forecasting projects. Especially, the Delphimethod has become popular among tourism experts in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. One of the results almost unanimously accepted is confidence in future growth of leisure time and paid holidays, in a rising number of families travelling twice or three times a year and in an overall increase of all tourism/travel categories. Though there is widespread understanding that the growth rate will be diminishing, optimism prevails with respect to the tourism/leisure ratio (i.e. “the proportion of leisure time spent in tourism”. The “lemming” paradigm is still dominating the minds of policy makers and managers: “We do not know why they move, but we know that, at certain times of the year, they all start moving — and we have a fair idea of the destinations.”
This chapter enhances insights into destination image and competitor assessments by extending the research framework of perception-based market segmentation by two perspectives…
Abstract
This chapter enhances insights into destination image and competitor assessments by extending the research framework of perception-based market segmentation by two perspectives: allowing generating individual sets of competitors and contrasting two stages of travel experience: pre- and after trip. The empirical study is based on two samples of leisure travelers: a mix of international travelers who just finished their trip to Thailand and a group of European travelers interested in visiting Thailand. Against conventional assumptions though supporting more recent findings on destination decision making the majority of travelers did not identify any direct competitor.
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Andreas M. Riege and Chad Perry
Focuses on how national travel and tourism authorities can market a country as a tourist destination, with particular reference to the marketing of Australia and New Zealand to…
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Focuses on how national travel and tourism authorities can market a country as a tourist destination, with particular reference to the marketing of Australia and New Zealand to target markets in Germany and the United Kingdom. These two nations in Europe are by far the most important tourist generating countries for Australia and New Zealand and there has been a recent substantial increase in the value of international travel and tourism revenues and promising future prospects. However, there is little research emphasising specific marketing and distribution strategies that may be applied by travel and tourism organisations, airlines and intermediaries to market a tourist destination successfully in overseas markets. This research collected data using in‐depth interviews with 41 experienced practitioners in Germany, the UK, Australia and New Zealand, and analysed the data with a rigorous case study methodology. The results of this research assist in clarifying the conceptual issues provided in the literature, linking theoretical marketing knowledge about strategies in the discipline of international travel and tourism marketing.
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The ability of tourism regions to attract tourists depends to a great extent on the position of these destinations in the minds of key travel markets. The projection of an…
Abstract
The ability of tourism regions to attract tourists depends to a great extent on the position of these destinations in the minds of key travel markets. The projection of an appropriate image has been described as a vital element in the positioning process. This research examines the evolving character of wine tourism destination imagery as projected by wine producers and independent writers. The overriding research questions addressed in this paper are “What destination attributes are emphasised in the visual imagery of wine tourism regions, and how has the emphasis on those features varied over time?” The findings suggest that there has been a shift in wine country imagery from an emphasis on wine production processes and related facilities to move of a focus on aesthetic and experiential values associated with more leisurely recreational and tourist pursuits. Over the past decade, the wine tourism experience has become more positioned around the core attraction of a quality wine, accompanied by a set of natural landscape, culinary, educational, event hosting and cultural dimensions. The research identifies the need for a greater emphasis to be placed by wine tourism destinations on protecting rural landscapes, encouraging authentic and unique forms of development, and focusing imagery projection on those elements of the wine country experience which are central to the interests of wine tourists.
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Khaldoon Nusair, Hamed Alazri, Usamah F. Alfarhan and Saeed Al-Muharrami
The purpose of this paper is to contribute to international tourism market segmentation research by proposing a comprehensive framework that examines behavioral, benefits and…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to contribute to international tourism market segmentation research by proposing a comprehensive framework that examines behavioral, benefits and lifestyle segmentations. The moderating roles of geographic segmentation (nationality) and advertising media types are also discussed.
Design/methodology/approach
Tourists volunteered to participate in a self-administered survey at random during peak seasons. Total number of collected questionnaires was 966. The authors used WarpPLS 6.0 software to analyze data.
Findings
Results from a sample of 919 tourists show that tourists in the benefit segmentation cluster had intentions to revisit the destination but they were unlikely to recommend it to others. Another finding indicates that marketing campaigns on different advertising media types might have different results when targeting different activities.
Originality/value
Leaning on the foundations of the marketing literature and the market segmentation theory, this research attempts to create a theoretical contribution that can be used to segment international tourists based on their travel motivations. Additionally, this study highlights the power of conditional probability approach, as it could be of more value than the predominant path coefficient approach.
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Gurjeet Kaur Sahi, Subhash Lonial, Mahesh Gupta and Nitasha Seli
This paper seeks to further the understanding of the domain of the IMO construct in a developing country, as suggested by Lings and Greenley. It seeks to build on their proposed…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper seeks to further the understanding of the domain of the IMO construct in a developing country, as suggested by Lings and Greenley. It seeks to build on their proposed construct and provide empirical evidence of its impact in the context of the Indian banking industry.
Design/methodology/approach
The behavioral dimensions of the construct are confirmed in a manner consistent with established market orientation (external) construct. The paper validates scale pertaining to the wants and needs of bank employees for effective intelligence generation and dissemination as well as for effective response implementation.
Findings
The authors find a positive significant relationship between internal market orientation and staff attitude and perceived customer satisfaction. Further, the impact of staff attitude on employee job satisfaction is also significant.
Research limitations/implications
Internal market orientation, with the passage of time, may not be as prevalent and exhaustive as it is now because the nature of the marketing environment is extremely dynamic. So, there is a need to make changes as time evolves so that this scale remains focused with a high level of reliability and validity.
Practical implications
To generate internal market intelligence, bank management should not only rely on internal customer surveys, but also the intelligence obtained through a variety of formal and informal means, such as meetings and discussion with internal customers; analysis of sales reports and worldwide customer databases; and formal market research, such as employees ' attitude surveys and sales response in a test market.
Originality/value
The present research would be of value to managers across the world for identifying key requirements of internal customers, which need to be evaluated consistently from time to time, for different strategic actions.