Community Tourism
Tourism, one of worlds’ largest industries, and promises to breathe new economic life into many Colombian communities. As changing economic conditions have raised concerns in traditional agricultural and industries, departmental, and local leaders as a vehicle for economic change have targeted tourism. Like many places around the world many Colombian communities, rural and urban alike are considering tourism as a way to revitalize, stabilize, and diversify their economies. They recognize that successful tourism development in other communities has generated new income, jobs, and tax revenues.
Tourists' expenditures filter through communities to create a chain of economic and social action. Some tourism jobs are filled by young people and other traditionally disadvantaged labor markets. Tax revenues generated by tourists' expenditures can contribute to supporting public facilities and services that a community might not otherwise afford. Playing host to "guests" often fosters a sense of community identity and pride.
This publication has been prepared to help you consider and initiate tourism development within your community. Five purposes were kept in mind:
SECTION 1.. To introduce tourism as an emerging industry in Colombia and as a strategy for economic development.
Section I presents some basic facts about tourism and provides important tourism definitions.
SECTION 2. To help you understand how tourism functions as a system of interconnected parts attractions, services, transportation, communication, and markets.
These parts together create tourism "products," (i.e. mixtures of experiences and benefits) that tourists receive. Section II will help you to understand the tourism system and the ways those community tourism products can be developed and marketed to select tourist markets.
SECTION 3. To assist you in evaluating tourism as an economic development alternative that addresses community needs.
The benefits that tourism delivers should be compared with your community's specific needs to determine if it is an appropriate economic development alternative. Section III of this publication will help you evaluate the potential benefits and costs of tourism development in your town.
SECTION 4. To present a planning process for tourism development that will help you establish tourism goals, assess, and build upon your community's special characteristics to achieve these goals.
While every community has its own unique attributes, general guidelines for tourism planning are applicable to all. Section IV of this publication outlines the steps of the tourism planning process. Worksheets are provided to help you apply the process to your community’s location, leadership, financial capabilities, and markets.
SECTION 5. To assist you in identifying important tourism networks that can complement your efforts.
Networking involves linking with other agencies and organizations to maximize efforts, share ideas and approaches, and learn from the experience and perspective of others. Networking is vital to effective community, regional, and statewide development. Individuals and organizations that represent each of these areas should be part of your tourism network. The companion publication Sources of Assistance for Tourism in Texas identifies organizations that will help to meet your ongoing tourism information needs.
Who Is This Publication For?
This publication has been prepared for business and community leaders within governmental, commercial, and non-profit organizations. These leaders include:
• councils of government, elected officials, and public administrators
• chambers of commerce, and convention and visitors bureaus
• tourism-related business owners and managers
• concerned citizens
• local and regional planners, and economic development officials
While many of the concepts, issues, and processes described within this manual will help individual organizations and businesses to more effectively respond to tourism, this publication has been prepared with a community approach in mind. That is, it focuses on the cooperation between public, commercial, and non-profit interests to achieve tourism benefits for an entire communityrather than just a single organization or enterprise. Processes and methods for gathering resident support and involvement are included as a key aspect for ensuring that tourism development contributes to the well being of those who host the visitors in their town and regions. Special emphasis has been placed on assisting smaller Texas communities. However, the concepts, issues, and processes presented here are relevant to communities of any size or location. The focus of this publication is on the development of pleasure travel in your community, although the same process is appropriate for business travel markets.
Tourism: An Emerging Industry
Tourism, now recognized as one of the world's major economic and social activities, and has been estimated to be the largest industry throughout the world.
Billions more dollars are spent on short haul and leisure trips. Most states, and many communitieslarge and small, rural and urbanhave recognized the economic benefits of capturing a portion of these travel expenditures. In Texas, the role of tourism is significant and increasing each year.
Defining Tourism And Tourists
The term tourism once described only travel undertaken for vacation or leisure purposes. Today, the travel industry defines tourism to include both pleasure and business travel. Because of the tendency to equate tourism with only pleasure travel, the industry has further adopted travel industry as the preferred terminology because of its more inclusive connotation. Over the years, there have been considerable discussions regarding the definitions of tourist and tourism industry. In practice, most differences in these definitions relate to the distance that one must travel to be considered a tourist.
The main reason for using the minimum distance criteria (50 or 100 miles) is to exclude routine travel of local residents. For the purpose of this publication tourist and tourism industry are broadly defined as:
• A tourist in the United States is anyone traveling 50 miles outside his or her community of residence to engage in activities which are not a part of the person's regular routine of activity, such as to work or school.11
• The tourism industry is considered as all businesses, organizations, governmental bodies, and their related facilities, lands and services that accommodate the needs of travelers.12
From a community perspective, one can easily see that tourism involves many different businessfood and beverage, transportation, attractions, retail, lodgingas well as the services and facilities of public and non-profit agencies and organizations. The degree to which a business or a public facility supports travelers will vary, as does the importance of tourism from community to community.
Foundations Of Community Tourism
Virtually every town and city now receives visitors of some kind. Therefore, tourism is already a part of their local economy. Some communities are naturally endowed with superior qualities for attracting tourists. However, by understanding the requirements of the travel industry most communities can be more effective in their tourism efforts.
What Can Tourism Do For Your Community?
Tourism successes do not just happen. Built upon an understanding of the tourism system, successful programs are the results of careful planning, management, and marketing.
The three basic elements of tourism are:
1. community (its people, services, businesses and industry)
2. attractions and events (things to do and see for visitors)
3. tourist markets (the people who travel to your community)
The challenge of developing community tourism is to systematically assess each of these elements and create strategies that are most likely to achieve your community tourism goals. Central to this assessment and the management of tourism is organization.
The decision to launch into a program to expand tourism development should be based on the ability of tourism to produce the desired outcomes or goals sought by the community. Early on, specific goals should be stated which guide your community tourism efforts. Defining community goals and developing tourism strategies are addressed in detail later in Sections III and IV.
Tourism may help some communities meet a variety of developmental needs. For example, tourism can:
• create opportunities for employment, especially underutilized resources
• increase revenues for local businesses and industry
• generate tax revenues
• increase stability by broadening the economic base
• reduce seasonal variations in revenues
• increase leisure opportunities for residents
• make the community more attractive
These benefits of tourism development are not without costs. Section II discusses how to evaluate tourism goals and Section III discusses some of the costs of tourism development (See Table 2, Section III).
Balancing Benefits and Costs: Sustainable Tourism
Tourism development in the community should consider both the costs and benefits of tourism. This will ensure that the destination’s resources are sustainable over the long-term. The concepts of sustainable development and sustainable tourism are often used in development related issues. Sustainability in tourism relates to both hosts and guests, as well as social, cultural, environmental, political and economic aspects of tourism planning and development. As defined by the World Tourism Organization, (Agenda 21 for the Travel and Tourism Industry, p. 30):
Sustainable tourism development meets the needs of present tourists and host regions while protecting and enhancing opportunity for the future. It is envisaged as leading to management of all resources in such a way that economic, social, and aesthetic needs can be fulfilled while maintaining cultural integrity, essential ecological processes, biological diversity, and life support systems.
For the local residents, tourism development impacts on their community’s economic, social, and cultural aspects, while directly affecting their quality of life. Adverse effects of tourism development on the integrity of the natural habitat surrounding a destination can affect the ecological integrity and the lifestyle which residents may wish to experience in that locality. Hence, it is critical to understand the nature of the tourism product, and the way tourism functions, if the benefits of tourism are to be gained and shared equitably among the destination’s many varied stakeholders, including the visitors and the residents of the host community or region. This is discussed next, in Section II.
It is important to remember that tourism is just one means of diversifying the community’s economic base, and therefore a careful analysis of the community’s overall economic and social situation is required as a first step in examining the potential for tourism as a tool for economic development. Thus tourism has to fit into the overall planning and development goals and objectives of the community, so that it contributes to improving the well being of the local residents and does not degrade the environmental and cultural resources of the destination community. A number of principles can be employed to ensure that the benefits of tourism are distributed fairly among the destination’s stakeholders, including the residents who often bear the costs of tourism development. These principles include, but are not limited to the following:
a.) Involve a broad spectrum of the destination’s stakeholders in the planning and development of tourism in the community. A stakeholder here is one who is impacted by tourism in the community, or one who has the potential to affect the development and planning of tourism in the destination. Cooperation and partnerships are important to enable the community to finance and market the destination’s attractions and also to manage the multiple impacts of tourism.
b.) Ensure that the benefits of tourism development are distributed equitably both in the short-term and long-term. Hence, the use and distribution of tourism related resources should be such that these are preserved not only for the benefit of present generations but also future generations of residents and visitors.
c.) Provide a high quality visitor experience while implementing sound environmental and cultural / heritage management practices, in order to manage the impacts of visitation on the destination’s resources (which may be renewable and non-renewable ones).
d.) Create opportunities for meaningful local employment and involvement in the tourism industry. Residents should be able to participate in controlling and making decisions about tourism in their community. They should also be involved in tourism practices involving the marketing and interpretation of local cultural and heritage attractions and events.
SectionII
How Does Tourism Function
Two functions of tourism most understood are promotion and accommodations. The first action frequently taken by communities embarking on a tourism development program is to raise money for promotion. The most conspicuous evidence of tourism in any community is the lodging facilities. Tourism, however, encompasses more than just promotion and accommodations, even as essential as they are. This section looks at five important topics that provide a foundation for understanding, considering, and building tourism in your community.
These topics are:
1. the market-destination principle
2. understanding and identifying target markets: the reasons people travel
3. components of successful leisure destinations: what your community has to offer people
4. the tourism system: the link between markets and destinations
5. conditions for effective tourism development
The Market-Destination Principle
All businesses have two important dimensions, markets, and products. This is certainly true, in principle, for tourism. Tourism differs, however, from industries such as manufacturing, because tourism moves markets to products, whereas manufacturing distributes its products to markets (see Figure1). This means that the “production,” marketing and consumption of tourism are inseparable from each other or from the destination.
• Tourism products are found in destinations (areas containing the attractions and services that provide tourism experiences and benefits to visitors). The product of tourism is the "experience package." It has been described as a mix of products and services.
• Travel markets represent those people willing and able to spend their time and money to receive those common experiences and benefits.
Unless markets (the consumers) know about the tourism products you have available, they will not make your community their travel destination. In addition, a community and its surrounding area must offer tourism attractions and services (products) that are in demand by a travel market. No amount of promotion will attract disinterested visitors. For this reason, those concerned with developing tourism must become very knowledgeable about the basic tourist flow and its two dimensions (the characteristics of their community that make it a unique and desirable place to visit, and those travel markets to which they can best appeal).
Understanding and Identifying Target Markets
It is impossible for your community to be all things to all tourists. Successful tourism development depends upon aiming your efforts at target markets, which is, taking a rifle approach rather than a shotgun approach. A rifle approach increases chance of scoring a direct hit, that is, being a great success with particular target markets. One of the best ways to develop and market your tourism destination is to appeal to specific market segments and target markets. The objective is to focus only on the needs and preferences sought by an identifiable set of visitors. Remember that there are many motivations to travel each representing an individual market. For example:
• to visit friends and family
• to conduct business in another town
• to attend conventions, festivals and special events
• to attend to personal needs, such as that related to health
• to go shopping
• to engage in outdoor recreation activities
• to experience places of historical or scenic value
Market Segmentation
As this list suggests, people travel for many different reasons. These different groups are called market segments. Market segmentation, the process of breaking the total travel market into smaller, more uniform groups, is one of the basic principles of tourism development and marketing. It recognizes that both business and pleasure travel markets have several separate segments, each with a unique set of needs and preferences.
How do you divide your market into segments? One common method is by geographic areas. In other words, where do your visitors come from? What cities, states, regions, or countries generate the greatest number of visitors?
By defining markets into segments one can better understand whom, when, how, and why people travel to your community. Without further definition, this data reveals little more than a clue for developing tourism. For this reason, it is necessary to identify other ways to further define markets into segments. In total, there are seven general approaches you can use:
1. purpose of trip
2. geographic origin of visitors
3. socio-economic or demographic characteristics
4. product-related
5. psychographic profiles
6. frequency and seasonality of use
7. channels of distribution
Each of these segmentation methods are further defined in Table 6 (Section IV). By combining these methods, you can more accurately begin to zero-in on your community's target markets. These often can be further described by: time of year for trips, amount of expenditures, frequency of visits, accommodation types, trip characteristics (length of stay, etc.), outdoor recreation activities, and demographics (ethnicity, income, age, gender, etc.)
While these descriptions help to identify the many types of tourists that are important to your area, they do not sufficiently explain what pushes or motivates people to engage in travel in the first place. An understanding of those motivations that tourists wish to satisfy through travel is critical to the development and marketing of any tourism destination.
The key to understanding tourists' motivations is to see travel as a satisfier of needs and wants. These needs and wants refer to much deeper personal concerns than the reasons usually given by people when asked, "Why do you travel?" For example, tourists do not take trips just to engage in recreational activities such as fishing. They take such trips with the hope that the travel experience will provide an escape from routine, physical relaxation, and perhaps the opportunity to make new friendships.
Why is it important to understand motivations such as these? Once you understand tourists needs and wants your community will be better prepared to satisfy them. Segmenting travel markets, as described above, provides a means of zeroing in on specific needs and wants.
Motivations For Pleasure Travel
The primary motive that drives all pleasure travel is the need for change.14 This often means the need to escape the routine, to explore new environments and to enjoy novel situations. Beyond this primary motive, people are pushed to travel by a variety of needs and wants. If motivations were the same for everyone, many of us would travel to the same destinations, do the same things, stay at the same types of hotels, and use the same kinds of transportation. Since this is not the case, differences in motivation help to define distinct travel markets to which different tourism destinations can be marketed.
The following are some common motivations for travel. Most travel is driven by the need to satisfy a combination of needs and wants, some of which may not be recognized by travelers themselves. As you read through this list, consider which combinations of motivations your community could easily and effectively satisfy.
Escape from Routine and Responsibility: While a temporary change in environment characterizes all travel, people often seek changes of other kinds. These may include a change in daily routine, a change in social group, or a change in leisure or work activities.
Relaxation: In everyday life, the term relaxation usually means physical rest. In a tourism context, however, relaxation often means taking time to pursue activities of interest. For tourists, engaging in physical activities often results in mental relaxation.
Regression: When people are comfortable they often feel freer to engage in behavior that they may not participate in at home. Hence, the need to "regress" or do things outside of everyday life drives some to travel.
Status and Prestige: Many people travel for recognition, attention, and appreciation. Certainly some destinations are more prestigious than others are and these will attract those tourists for whom status is a primary motive.
Family and Friend Togetherness: Family and friend considerations are an important travel motivation. The majority of all trips are taken to visit with family and friends in their home communities. Besides these visits, many people see the opportunity to travel and vacation as a family or friend group as a way to bring members closer together.
Meet New People: The desire to meet new people are satisfied by people-oriented trips, as opposed to place-oriented. Meeting new people means different things to different individuals. It can mean briefly meeting people from different backgrounds (something that occurs more easily while away from home), developing permanent new friendships, or interacting with local people.
Self-Discovery: Many people find that travel experiences help them to learn more about themselves. When traveling, people have the opportunity to learn how they react to new situations, such as meeting new people, overcoming hardships, and observing different cultures.
Education: A strong motive for travel is the desire to learn about a place, a historical period, or another culture. The education that travels provide is seen by many as a means for developing a well-rounded individual. For this reason, family travel is often undertaken for educational purposes (as well as the motive of family togetherness discussed earlier).
Novelty: The need for novelty refers to curiosity, adventure, and the need to experience things that are new and different. People who are driven to travel primarily by this motive rarely visit the same destination twice. While this market may not yield a high degree of return visitation to a destination, its members are likely to spend sufficient time and money to thoroughly explore all that it has to offer.
In addition to these motivations for travel, there are numerous other factors influencing a tourist's decision making process. Many tourists or traveling groups seek multiple benefits. For example, a traditional family (mother, father, and two children) will "package" their weekend trip to Houston to include activities that appeal to each family member. Thus, their excursion may include a variety of dissimilar activities such as visiting a professional sporting event, a theme park, the space center, and a major shopping mall all under the auspices of visiting Aunt Millie and Uncle Bert. What is important for tourism planners to remember is that although consumer behavior in the travel industry is indeed very complex, one should always seek to learn more about it and to better understand the visitor.
Components of Successful Leisure Destinations
As already shown, tourism is much like other industries in that its two basic dimensions are markets and products. Tourism differs from many industries however, because it moves markets to products. The movement of tourist markets to destinations (where tourism products are found) can be thought of as a push-pull relationship. People are pushed to travel by motivations; that is, the need to satisfy needs and wants. Destinations that promise to satisfy them pull these tourists to them.
As with other industries, members of tourist markets spend their time and money to receive certain products. Many businesses and community residents see their tourism product only as attractions, meals, accommodations, or recreational facilities. In fact, how these tangible things help to satisfy tourists' needs and wants is important.
The tourism product is the mixture of benefits (i.e. need and want satisfiers) produced by a destination that tourists rightly or wrongly believe they will receive when they choose to visit it. For example, visitors to Panaca buy tickets for rides, meals, and possibly accommodations they receive. But these are only necessary to satisfy their desire for fun and novelty in the area's unique water environment. Effective promotional efforts will be those that stress the opportunity for fun and novelty. Effective management of tourist areas will ensure that the visitor has fun and enjoys novelty by providing activities, services, and information in a pleasant environment.
From the visitors' point of view, your community consists of many different elements that all together provide a tourism experience. These elements include attractions, services and atmosphere, which must be seen through the eyes of the visitor. The atmosphere of your community is influenced by the quality of its physical environment and the hospitality that resident hosts extend toward their visiting guests. Look at each of these important elements in greater detail.
Attractions
While the desire to satisfy individual needs and wants pushes people to travel, attractions are what pull them to one destination instead of another. Attractions are the core component of a destination area. They satisfy demand in a destination and help to distinguish a place as an outdoor recreation destination; historic attractions help to distinguish a place as a cultural destination.
Tourism attractions that may significantly impact a community may be found within as well as outside its environs. For example, a state park that is located outside but nearby a community may generate a great deal of tourism activity within the community itself. Attractions that may be important to different travel markets include the following:
Natural Attractions: lakes, forests, parks, beaches, and a warm and sunny climate. These attractions often appeal to markets seeking outdoor recreation.
Man-Made Attractions: theme parks, well-known restaurants, a string of antique shops, and a modern factory tour.
Historic Attractions: battle sites, old forts, historic museums and monuments, pioneer churches, and homes of famous persons.
Ethnic and Cultural Attractions: historic re-enactments, ethnic communities, Indian villages, and historic towns. These attractions give tourists the opportunity to view the customs of another time or culture.
Special Events: home tours, music festivals, craft events, antique shows, sports events, and agricultural celebrations. These are usually built around a community theme, entertaining, educating, and often allowing visitor participation.
Family and Friends: local population can be one of the most important attractors to your community. Travel to visit family and friends accounts for the majority of all personal travel.
Business and Medical Services and Government Offices: These services all attract visitors to communities. Many tourists will be pulled to a town because of its food and lodging services. Others will travel specifically to conduct personal, government, or corporate business.
Services
Services are support elements in the tourism system. Once attractions have pulled tourists to a destination area, services meet their needs. Services are administered by commercial and public sectors. The commercial sector includes businesses that provide lodging, food, and beverage services, local transportation, service stations, entertainment, and shopping. The public sector services include police and fire protection, transportation, utilities, visitor services, and the provision of public recreation programs and park facilities. Services are a very important part of the tourism product from both the visitors and community's viewpoint.
• From the visitors' perspective, services meet their need for relaxation and comfort.
• From the community's viewpoint, commercial services generate spending by tourists and are primarily responsible for tourism's economic impact.
• Services and attractions are tightly linked because the services support tourists' needs as generated by attractions. For example, expenditures by tourists at hotels, restaurants, and service stations generally cannot be expected to increase unless the quantity and/or quality of attractions is improved. Likewise, insufficient or poor quality services will detract from the overall tourists' experience in the area, and it is unlikely they will return to the attraction or encourage others to visit in the future.
Atmosphere
Attractions and services are the tangible elements of a destination area. Less visible but equally important is the atmosphere that surrounds attractions and services. This atmosphere or ambiance is what conveys a positive friendly feeling to visitors, and influences them to spend their hard-earned money and free time in the area. Three things contribute to a community's atmosphere: environmental quality, hospitality, and quality and value.
Environmental Quality: refers to the physical environment. This environment includes parts of what might be considered a community's infrastructure, such as roads, sidewalks, signs, parking facilities, convenient access, litter and trash management, parks, and open space. Downtown redevelopment efforts, Main Street programs, historic preservation, and community beautification make important contributions to a desirable tourism environment. The more attractive and accommodating a community's physical environment (beginning with the important "entrance experience"), the more likely it will be that tourists will have a satisfying visit.
Hospitality: refers to the human environment. Visitors to tourist destinations are greatly impacted by the friendliness of local populations. Hospitality says to tourists, "Welcome, we're proud of our community and would like to share it with you." In tourist communities, hospitality becomes the responsibility of all front-line workers who meet tourists face to face as well as "backstage" residents who support tourism. Police, service station attendants, lodging employees, restaurant personnel, shop owners, attractions managers, and the residents who provide directions, assistance, or just a welcoming smile all have an important hospitality role to play. Those communities that have been most successful with tourism have recognized the importance of hospitality, and have launched community-wide educational and public relations programs to encourage citizens to be informed and friendly natives.
Quality and Value: The above discussion explains the relationship between markets and destinations, yet there are also economic factors influencing an individual’s decision to travel. For example, the perceived value or price/quality relationship of travel decisions is critical to completing travel transactions. Paris, France may be alluring to many Americans who wish to escape to the charm and excitement of Parisian nightlife, but few possess resources to complete the travel transaction. This price/quality relationship is also relevant to the tourism providers in more advanced tourism communities who examine the price/quality relationship of their markets and their tourism product. The question always remains, are the opportunity costs and actual expenditures lesser or greater than the perceived benefits? The impact of opportunity costs in this equation should not be underestimated. Travel time, competing activities, and other responsibilities weigh heavily on any travel decision. This phenomenon is particularly true in societies that is increasingly harried and time conscious.
Two Kinds Of Destinations
While every destination depends on attractions, services, environmental quality and hospitality, destinations can in the broadest sense be classified in one of two ways, primary or secondary.
Primary Destinations: are those that have sufficient strength in the mix of attractions and services to justify the “trip” (see Figure 2). They are capable of attracting and meeting the needs of tourists for the majority of their trip.
Secondary Destinations: meet the needs of tourist in one of two ways:
a) They may be capable of attracting travelers for a side visit as they are on their way to or from a primary destination.
b) They may be a necessary stop on the way to or from a primary destination. At these kinds of destinations the services that are available meals gas, accommodations, etc. become the attractions. These destinations are called travel nodes.
Destination areas can be primary destinations for one travel market segment and secondary destinations for other markets.
From the traveler's point of view, your community is not just a placeit is a setting in which tourists can have certain experiences and have their needs and wants satisfied. The attractions, services, environmental conditions, and hospitality within your community shape these experiences. They represent your community's unique tourism product. The more opportunity for different experiences available within your community, the greater it’s potential for tourism. For this reason, many communities team up with other communities nearby in a regional tourism destination approach.
Remember that the key to understanding what your community has that tourists want is to see it through their eyes. As an old marketing adage (modified for tourism) suggests:
"To sell Jill Jones what Jill Jones buys you've got to see your destination through Jill Jones' eyes."
The Tourism System
By now we have come to understand three important topics:
1. The market-destination principle.
2. What pushes (motivates) people to travelhow different motives help to understand different travel markets.
3. What pulls people to destinations and provides them with a satisfying visit while there.
This section looks at the two ways that markets and destinations are linked through transportation and communications. These linkages between markets and destinations complete the functional tourism system.
In the tourism system, each element (markets, destinations, transportation, communications) is dependent upon the others. The system is like a spider's webtouch one part of it and reverberations will be felt throughout. The following describes transportation and communication linkages between markets and destinations.
Transportation
Transportation physically links markets with destinations. Automobile, bus, air, and rail are all important modes of travel. The convenience, safety, reliability, speed, comfort, and price of transportation are important to travelers. Changes in any one of these factors can greatly influence the flow of markets to destinations. Transportation is the one part of the tourism system that seems to be particularly volatile in current times. Changing fuel prices, airline and bus deregulation, and a growing senior market that enjoys coach travel are all trends that affect transportation.
Communication
Communication refers to the flow of information between markets and destinations... between the consumers (travelers) and the suppliers of the tourism experience. This flow occurs in two directions: 1) from destinations to markets (called promotion); and 2) from markets back to destination (called market research). This two-way flow of information is essential to the link between markets and destinations.
Promotion
Many people think of promotion only as brochures and other forms of advertisement. Promotion actually refers to a mix of six primary activities that help to convey information and images about a destination. Each of the six activities of the promotion mix can be used alone, or in combination by a destination to communicate with the travel markets they want to attract. These activities include:
1. Advertising: any paid form of non-personal presentation about a destination that is communicated through mass media. Leaflets, brochures, newspaper/magazine ads, direct mail, and billboards are forms of advertising.
2. Personal Selling: direct person-to-person communication regarding a destination. Community members in direct contact with tourists daily can recommend places to eat, sleep, and visit, which is personal selling.
3. Publicity: non-personal favorable communications in print or broadcast media that appears in news story form. While many destinations groups and suppliers hope that travel writers will provide favorable publicity, others are proactive in working with writers already producing favorable publicity.
4. Incentives: items having financial value that are offered to encourage markets to travel to destinations. Weekend discount rates at hotels, family discounts at attractions, free meals, and two-for-one specials are all incentives designed to encourage travel.
5. Programming refers to the ways that attractions, services, and the atmosphere of a destination are tied together to convey a unique and attractive image that will encourage visitor interest. For example, communities have grouped their tourism attractions, services, and atmosphere to convey "Old West" adventure or botanical themes. Proper programming assures that "on-site" visitor information needs are met within the community. Signage, maps, and guides all help to program and promote destinations.
6. Packaging: the presentation of products and services that would normally be purchased one at a time. In a package, multiple products are offered at a single price. A motor coach tour is an example.
Marketing Research
Marketing research allows consumers to communicate back to managers of destinations. Simply stated, marketing research means finding out about your markets' characteristics, needs and wants. In the broadest sense, all communities have two markets: existing markets (those people who already visit the destination) and potential markets (those people who might be encouraged to visit in the future). For most communities, the greatest opportunities for tourism development are found in existing markets (more will be said about this in Section IV). For this reason, communities should learn as much as they can about these very important visitors.
There are many ways to conduct marketing research, some more technical than others, but all communities can gather information and feedback from existing tourists in a systematic, simple way15. Inquiries regarding where visitors are from and how they enjoyed their stay will provide valuable information that will help your community to effectively manage the complete tourism system.
Information gathering techniques that can be used on a regular basis include:
• registration/reservation records at lodging businesses and welcome centers to provide market origin data, visitor profiling, and a basis for sampling
• completed questionnaires on market demographics, service satisfaction, travel habits, and so on
• complaint records and comment cards
• coupon returns and inquiries generated by advertising
• license plate surveys and car counts
• admission records at attractions
Who Is Responsible For The Tourism System?
Figure 3 on the following page illustrates the Functioning Tourism System. From the supply side, many commercial, public, and non-profit decision-makers are responsible for the attractions, services, and other elements of the tourism system. When we speak of a tourism industry, the statement is only partially true. The tourism system is not managed solely by the commercial sector as the word industry implies. Instead, commercial, public, and non-profit sectors all work together to provide the important elements of the tourism system. Table 1 on page 23 illustrates the range of involvement on the part of each of these sectors. While each of these sectors may have their own reasons for involvement in tourism, the best overall results are achieved when they recognize and work together to achieve common tourism development goals. This is the community approach to tourism development.
Figure 3. The Functioning Tourism System.
Section III
