TOURISM

Tourism Products Management strategy

Tourism Products Management strategy

Introduction

The primary aim of this research was to undertake a qualitative study of how public sector event development agencies determine strategies to foster events tourism and the stakeholder orientations they adopt in shaping these strategies. There is a very high level of investment in tourism marketing and the integration of key events into the national tourism organization's domestic and international marketing strategy is now legislated. The Tourism Act 2004 outlined the requirement for Tourism (the NTO) to establish a division to concentrate on the business and major events sectors. Hence, an understanding of the dynamics of strategy making for events tourism across different states/territories is of national interest.

Strategy and its application in tourism

A search of papers in Annals of Tourism Research and Tourism Management since the 1980s demonstrates that the word ' strategy ' has mostly been used in a generic sense to describe national approaches to destination development, e.g. Denmark, Singapore and Hungary (Fletcher & Cooper, 1996; Ooi, 2002). The concept of strategy is often used casually (Athiyaman, 1995) and various theorists (Athiyaman & Robertson, 1995; Hall, 2000; Jamal & Getz, 1996; Soteriou & Roberts, 1998; Tremblay, 2000; Tribe, 1997) note the repeated focus on 'strategic planning' rather than ' strategy' or strategy making.

Here, Athiyaman's (1995) paper in Tourism Management addressing the tourism and strategy interface made overt reference to this gap in the literature. Okumus and Wong (2005) made a related observation that strategy is still taught in many tourism and hospitality courses from a planning perspective and strategic management literature in tourism lags far behind mainstream knowledge about strategy (Hax & Majluf, 1991).

To gain insights to tourism strategy and in turn, events tourism, Mintzberg et al.'s (2003) basic question of ' strategies about what?' deserves thought. Tourism is a sector of multiple, but related industries and so, by necessity; strategy operates at different levels (local, regional, national). In turn, it can be analyzed for the school of strategy adopted, its focus and content, its governance including the structures in which it occurs (Hall, 2000), the processes employed, the participants in these processes and timeframes.

The focus of strategy or 'what it is about' may be tourism infrastructure and land use; destination management or the corporate, business and functional activities of tourism organizations. However, within destination management organizations and state tourism offices, strategy is most often referred to in the context of marketing. Whether or not they deliberately consider the overall approach or school of strategy being adopted, most authors conclude that strategic planning with its deliberate and sequential processes offers some guidance to managers (Soteriou & Roberts, 1998), but not the whole solution.

There is growing evidence that many tourism theorists acknowledge behavioral forms of strategy, albeit without direct reference to ' strategy ' in their work. Since the late 1990s, tourism research has increasingly referred to entrepreneurialism, collaboration, learning and knowledge, power and political processes in destination development. Halme's (2001) discussion of strategies derived from network-based learning and ...