TOURISM MARKETING

Tourism Marketing

Tourism Marketing

Introduction

The above-mentioned technological developments have obvious impacts on power relationships and structural configurations in the tourism industry. They also create new opportunities for value creation and challenge established ways in which services are provided as well as their value per se and likelihood to lead to competitive advantages (Gratzer, Werthner, Winiwarter, 2004). IT has also led to change in the marketing environment of the tourism industry. Website marketing and search engine marketing have become essential components of contemporary tourism marketing. Yet, the degree to which more sophisticated techniques have been implemented remains rather low and innovation in Web marketing is not widespread, at least not among destination marketing organizations in the USA (Zach et al., 2007, 2008).

Web Based Techniques To Enhance Tourism

Destination marketing organizations (DMOs) (see Chapter 24) are particularly affected by technological developments (Gretzel et al., 2006). Their “product” is destination-related information and such information is increasingly provided by other websites; e.g., those of travel agencies, portals, publishers, consumer communities, and even suppliers. Also, destination management systems (Brown, 2004) have been developed to integrate content at the destination-level and to provide a common distribution platform for all providers at the destination. While in many cases these systems are owned and managed by DMOs, private versions of such systems also exist and could easily take over many functions of DMOs. Thus, DMOs have to constantly adapt their offerings and services to the new realities of tourism marketing. At the same time, their organizational structures often prohibit them from successfully adjusting to technological developments (Yuan et al., 2006). Especially smaller DMOs with limited resources seem to lag behind in terms of successfully integrating new technologies and implementing new marketing approaches (Gretzel and Fesenmaier, 2002). DMOs also face the challenge of increasing pressure on demonstrating accountability. They have yet to establish valid and comprehensive performance measures for their online marketing efforts in order to be able to justify their existence (Gretzel et al., 2006). Finally, emerging technologies often provide opportunities for collaboration within the destination and among destinations in a region. However, technology alone cannot overcome barriers to collaboration and DMOs have to become more and more engaged in partnership building in order to be able to realize the opportunities promised by Web-based collaborative marketing (Wang and Fesenmaier, 2006, 2007).

Most notably and recently, so-called Web 2.0 technologies (Gretzel, 2006), which are based on user-generated content and social networking applications, provide tourism marketers with increasing challenges (Schmallegger and Carson, 2008). Costly branding strategies employed by tourism marketers can easily be undermined by consumer reviews and blogs. These contents are perceived as more credible than marketer-based information and are extremely search engine friendly, thus making it likely that they reach greater rates of exposure and have more impact on consumers (Yoo and Gretzel, 2008). While user-generated contents provide tourism marketers with invaluable information about their consumers, ways to efficiently capture sentiments from dispersed contents have yet to be found and marketers have yet to learn how to respond to comments and seize ...