MARKETING IN TRAVEL AND TOURISM

Marketing in Travel and Tourism



Marketing in Travel and Tourism

Tourism has been one of the most prominent and high-profile industry to exist on the face of the earth. Travelling, leisure, recreation, all have been greatly associated with tourism since people visits different places, exploring all sites and sounds to satisfy their innate need for adventure and peace at the same time. For this paper, we shall be covering the core concepts of marketing, the impact of marketing and management and the overall impact of the discipline of marketing upon the functioning and running of the tourism industry in today's modern world (Beldona, 2008).

Tourism is defined as travel to a place outside the usual residential environment, involving a stay of at least one night but no more than 1 year, with varying motivations, such as business, pleasure, visits to friends and relatives (VFR), and education. It is one of the world's largest industries. Tourism has long been of interest to geographers, given its spatial, temporal, and activity patterns and given its major economic and environmental impacts, ranging from the local to the global. Geographers have been influential in developing conceptual models for explaining tourism development. Some of the most important models are resort morphology, the tourist-historic city, and the tourist area cycle. Given environmental degradation and traffic hazards with this traditional resort model, newer shore resorts have increasingly integrated accommodations with the sea via yacht moorings.

Likewise, modern integrated ski resorts similarly physically integrate the snow front (slopes and uphill facilities) with concentrated resort buildings. As with new urbanism developments, these new resort models allow for greater integration of accommodations and activities, reduce the amount of land developed, and promote more efficient service provision (e.g., heating, water, sewage). However, equity issues have arisen since integrated development generally favours a single developer, often from distant metropolitan areas and having the needed capital and technical expertise, over smaller local or regional entities (Beldona, 2008).

Key factor in marketing tourism and travel

The most important marketing aspect of travel and tourism is the place which has been put up for advertisement. Geographers have also played an important role in infusing critical perspectives into tourism research. In his seminal 1991 article integrating critical theory and political economy into the study of tourism, “Tourism, Capital, and Place: Towards a Critical Geography,” Stephen Britton called attention to the fact that tourism is an important avenue of capitalist accumulation. Places are symbolically marketed as desirable experiences that impart status to those visiting or consuming them. Critical political economy/ecology perspectives on tourism have also been used to examine topics such as imbalances in consumption, impacts on host communities, environmental justice, and sustainable development. The political ecology framework is particularly suited to looking at the impacts of nature protection for economic development and struggles to maintain customary land use, livelihoods, and access to natural resources (Beldona, 2008).

Another key and prominent tool that has been identified implies the availability and incentive of hotel and hospitality packages that work ...