A Practical Guide to Managing Tourist Experiences

Isabelle Frochot

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000520385
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Industria dell'ospitalità e del turismo
• Index: Business

This book provides students with a concise and practical guide that presents key understandings of the tourist experience and provides strategic guidance on how to develop an impactful and memorable experience.

Chapters follow the path of the tourist journey, firstly exploring consumer behaviour, the decision-making process and the tourist's need for escape, and providing insights into the strategic implications of consumer behaviour and the concept of immersion in tourism. Subsequent chapters look at the impact of experiences; consider trends in tourism experience such as wellness, sustainability, authenticity and fantasy; and provide experience design models. The final chapter offers a unique ten-step approach to designing impactful and memorable tourist experiences. Highly practical and engaging, this book is packed full of case studies and examples, from forest bathing in Finland to truffle hunting in Italy, as well as tools and exercises to guide the design process.

This book offers students a full understanding of how the experience is lived from the tourist perspective, how tourism providers can manage that process and how to develop successful experimental marketing interventions. This is essential reading for all tourism students and future tourism managers.

Chapter 1
Investigating vacation behaviour

DOI: 10.4324/9781003019237-2

Introduction

This book is set within the broader framework of consumer behaviour. Before addressing the notion of experience, it is essential to go back to the roots of behaviour: what it means, how it is conceptualized, its implications in terms of marketing and management strategies and how it is specifically investigated in the field of tourism. This chapter will address in the first place how behaviour is defined and its characteristic models, and it will then explain why behaviour is a strategic marketing weapon. The chapter will then address the specificities of tourism behaviour and why it necessitates a specific focus. Finally, the chapter will address the special characteristics of tourism segmentation and how it helps managers to strategically better understand their markets. Last but not least, we will address the notion of experience and experiential marketing.

1.1 What is behaviour?

The field of consumer behaviour investigates how consumers make their decisions at an individual or group level and why they decide to purchase, use and/or reuse products and services. Necessarily, looking at decision-making means that companies and destinations also need to understand when consumers are likely to purchase products and services, how they are going to purchase them, where they will purchase them, with what regularity, etc.

The field of consumer behaviour is a rich field that has developed over several decades and has accumulated a vast field of knowledge. The complexity of human behaviour has called for a scientific knowledge coming from various fields. For instance, psychology has been a key contributor, bringing valuable knowledge in understanding the human mind and behaviour, helping to understand feelings, ideas and behaviours and how decisions and actions are fuelled. Sociology has also brought a rich comprehension of social behaviour, society dynamics and social interactions, and helps us understand how behaviour relates to broader cultural and social influences. Other fields bring an interesting insight into consumer behaviour, such as Consumer Culture Theory (CCT), which conveys a very pertinent outlook on consumption from social and cultural perspectives. CCT looks at consumption not just as a commercial transaction, but also as a source of social integration and identity formation. Other disciplines also provide valuable insights; for instance, the fields of human geography, neuroscience, and economics all bring their own contribution to the general understanding of consumer behaviour.

1.2 The tourism specificities

If the various disciplines contributing to the understanding of consumer behaviour bring a rich understanding of its dynamics, why study specifically tourism behaviour? The field of tourism is a multidisciplinary field which concentrates extensive knowledge on the various dimensions of the tourism phenomenon. Within the broad spectrum of consumption, tourism stands apart due to the characteristics it has that not many other consumption contexts share.

1.2.1 Tourist behaviour is unique

Tourism consumption takes place far away from consumers’ homes. The different contexts and opportunities that can be encountered at the destination create the source of tourism demand and the competitive advantage of receiving destinations. New landscapes, new cultures, new communities all bring novelty and tourists’ desire to discover other ways of living. Nonetheless, some forms of tourism have been recognized as providing limited contacts with destinations whilst still producing consumer satisfaction (some all-inclusive resorts, cruising, etc.). The distance between tourists’ location and the destinations they visit implies that consumers cannot see a service in advance of its consumption (brochures, videos and 3D representations might assist their understanding, but the destination will be fully discovered only once the actual holiday starts).

By definition, holidays often take place in environments that can be drastically different from consumers’ habitual environments. Physically, culturally, socially, the holiday experience usually projects consumers into different environments that necessitate adaptation, skills and understanding that not many other consumption situations entail.

Holidays are a temporary period away from the usual constraints and pressures where consumers can behave differently, find a new self and experience new activities that can lead to profound transformations.

1.2.2 The tourism context is specific and unique

From a strategic perspective, other characteristics of the tourism industry necessitate approaches that are different to those of traditional marketing. For instance, tourism is a highly seasonal industry. This seasonality is in many instances a weakness: the more seasonal a tourism sector is, the more difficult it will be to sustain strong economic activity. Highly seasonal sectors call for more seasonal workers, workers who might not live locally all year round, and the resorts/destinations’ physical capacities (accommodation and catering facilities, for example) will only be used for a fraction of the year. Expanding tourism over the four seasons is a solution that many destinations would like to achieve because it means developing more economical and social stability for their economy. Seasonality also means that strategies need to be developed to target different consumers across different seasons. It also implies that tourism products will be sold at variable costs and marketed differently to these different markets. The tourism industry has high infrastructure costs and because it is a service; perishability is an inevitable feature of the industry (an unsold hotel room for a day is a revenue that is lost forever). Whilst revenue management techniques bring a powerful strategic approach to increase facilities’ (and destinations) occupancy rates, they cannot resolve the broader question of seasonality on their own. Reducing seasonality is an objective that needs to be managed at destination level, and that involves different competencies, including planning, facilities development and governance.

The tourism industry encapsulates different questions because it involves both private and public actors. The dynamics of tourism relies on the efficiency of the interrelationships between these economic spheres. Public actors, from local tourism information centres to destination marketing organizations and tourism ministries, drive the tourism industry at destination level. Public actors manage the destination, taking into account the destination facilities but also taking on board broader competitive and geopolitical issues. They also have at their core the aim of developing tourism in harmony with the inherent needs of the local population and actors’ networks at the destination. Public organizations might decide to boost specific tourism sectors and activities rather than others. They might consider improving the destination’s image by monitoring some developments more closely and restricting them within their own destinations (for instance, Amsterdam is a key example of a destination that is aiming to improve its image by reducing its coffee-shop reputation and minimizing the visibility of the prostitution sector). Public organizations also increasingly manage their tourism industries with local populations’ living conditions at heart. Whilst this aspect had been less considered in the past, it has become a real concern, especially with questions of overtourism, which have clearly shown that tourism developments can have negative impacts on local populations that need to be managed.

The public sector, however, cannot manage a tourism industry on its own. It can give direction and promote and federate tourism actors, and it works intimately with networks of private actors at their destinations. Actors’ networks have been the object of increased attention over recent decades; they are at the heart of service provision, contributing to the destination’s image and to the production of the holiday experience, providing services from accommodation and catering facilities to activities of various types and travel management operators (with travel agencies and tour operators as distribution agents). The tourism industry features a large proportion of fairly small enterprises (SMEs), and tourism actors are spread across vast territories. The role of destination management systems is therefore not just to act on strategic and marketing decisions for their destinations; Destination Marketing Organisations (DMOs) also have a central role to play in federating the range of actors that are involved in their tourism provision.

The tourism industry cannot be conceived in isolation from the rest of the world. Tourism markets are interdependent, and occurrences of crises have demonstrated how events taking place in one part of the world have strong implications for other destinations. For example, the Arab spring reduced the demand for northern African tourism destinations and witnessed a shift of tourism demand for other seaside destinations in the Southern European Mediterranean destinations of Croatia and Turkey. The pandemic that shattered the tourism industry in 2020 has had dramatic impacts on international tourism demand. However, it has also boosted domestic demand, and many tourism destinations managed to keep their tourism sector afloat by catering to the needs of domestic visitors.

The tourism industry is therefore a particularly vast sector, one that combines a multiplicity of tourism actors, but it is also an industry that always evolves and needs to integrate local needs and economic balance in the development of tourism. This chapter will focus primarily on tourist demand, which is the preliminary knowledge necessary in order to better understand experiential marketing.

1.3 Consumers as decision makers

The process of consumer decision-making has been investigated in the marketing field and has produced a dense field of knowledge that this book cannot fully report. Decisions are influenced by various personal, societal and individual elements and we shall address in this chapter how decisions are taken and the different influences that impact them.

1.3.1 The decision process

The recognition of a need is at the origin of the process of consumer choice. Once this need is recognized, the consumer will be motivated to embark on a process of purchasing a tourist product. This process then integrates a search for information, which will lead to the identification of a set of products able to meet the needs of the consumer (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 The tourist decision-making process. Source: Adapted from Woodside and King (2001).

Individuals only know a fraction of the total set of options available in the market and only retain those that they know and that are feasible within their time and budget limits. Then the selected destinations are evaluated on the basis of a series of attributes in limited number (generally three to four). Certain tourism decisions, such as the organization of an independent trip, are made up of a multitude of subdecisions (choice of transport, accommodation, dates, duration, activities, budget, etc.), the whole of which is particularly complex. On the other hand, package tours, resorts or cruises are products sold in their entity. In these situations, the decision will have fewer elements and will be limited to a choice by product type, destination or brand.

It is believed that a profusion of products and destinations can meet the first two stages of tourism choice. The finalization of the choice of a destination takes place mainly during the third and fourth stages. The choice is made on a set called a “consideration set”. This set brings together destinations capable of satisfying consumer needs. It is estimated that this set does not include more than seven destinations (Moutinho, 1987).

Understanding tourists’ travel decisions

The Travel Industry Association of America conducted a survey that aimed to identify factors that play a ...