Tourism is system of three elements: Places, Guests and Hosts.  As such, it’s all about PEOPLE. If people change their values and their perception of how the world works, then everything else changes.

There are multiple forces shaking up the tourism system:

1. The key human actors in the system are shifting not only their values but their core understanding of how the world works
2. The industrial model on which tourism is based is collapsing. As it matures, it produces diminishing net returns to all participants, and relies on volume growth to compensate for yield declines.  As visitor volume increases, so do the costs associated with resource depletion, pollution and wealth concentration.
3. External pressures will require the tourism economy to pay significantly more for services that hitherto have been free or relatively cheap. These cost increases will occur when reduced incomes and higher demand volatility are already compromising the resilience and profitability of existing businesses.

Survival and prosperity depend not just on becoming green but waking up to a whole new way of doing business that can, in part, be summarized as follows:

Practitioners of the new, ecological model start with a higher sense of Purpose. They know that profit follows purpose – a commitment to use the business to make the world a better place. Instead of discounting their primary asset – the Place – they focus on protecting, expressing and celebrating its unique Personality to sustain and increase its value to guests.  The passion of all hosts (employees, suppliers, residents), combines with a clear sense of Purpose to PULL in (attract) the kind of guest who will most value what the provider has to offer.

Unless tourism enterprises embrace the new model they will continue to see their profit margins shrink; their resilience to external shocks weaken; and their viability diminish. Tourism entrepreneurs and their communities need to assume responsibility for changing and cannot assume that traditional institutions or agencies can supply fixes.

Conscious Travel is building an e-learning platform and on and offline communities designed to stimulate and nourish the capacity of tourism entrepreneurs – the 99% – to flourish in new market circumstances.

The goal is to build an environmentally sustainable, socially just and spiritually fulfilling form of tourism that generates real net benefits to all stakeholders in the tourism system: guests, employees, investors, suppliers and the host community.

Typically, tourists have been travelling around FIT, with many in campervans, deciding on where to stay and what to do when they arrive in each town.  Our pre-RWC poll showed a skew towards poor forward bookings – however is this actually what has happened so far?

We’d love to have your vote on the poll below in regard to your September bookings received whether you are an activity or accommodation business. We will conduct a poll again at the end of the RWC in late October to get another overview.

Keep an eye out for the next webinar coming soon…

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Space is limited.

Reserve your Webinar seat now at:

https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/787900846

Guest Speaker: Genevieve Atkinson, Fossick
Host: James Hacon, Kiwi Dreams

Title: Kiwi Dreams & Tourism Inudstry Blog: Tackling the subject of Review Sites
Date: Thursday, July 14, 2011
Time: 6:30 PM – 7:30 PM NZST
After registering you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the Webinar.

System Requirements
PC-based attendees
Required: Windows® 7, Vista, XP or 2003 Server
Macintosh®-based attendees
Required: Mac OS® X 10.5 or newer

We hope to run two webinars a month over a three month period as a trial with an aim of speaking to people that are doing innovative, quirky or news worthy things in the New Zealand tourism scene.

We’ll be giving you an opportunity to leave questions that you’d like asked here on the Tourism Industry Blog a week before each webinar, then you can log-on and listen in or come and find the recordings afterwards here on the blog.

We’re delighted to have a few speakers confirmed, but we’re asking you – who would you like to see us chat to about what they are up to?

Leave us a comment to let us know.

If you are interested in being involved as a speaker then please contact me by emailing james@kiwi-dreams.co.nz

We look forward to seeing your suggestions!

Enter your vote and comments.

With the new General Manager for Qualmark announced (see more about this on the Motella blog article), it’s timely to revisit what tourism operators around New Zealand think about Qualmark.

Let us know your thoughts by voting on the poll and leave a comment on the article for more detailed discussion. Your feedback will no doubt be appreciated by the new General Manager…

Tick any that apply and feel free to leave a comment below the article for more detailed thoughts.

What do you think? Do you agree or disagree with the merge?  Vote below or leave a detailed comment.

So should we in fact combine resources with Australian tourism from time to time for particular campaigns and in some markets?  Interested to see how you vote, feel free to comment too.

The Aussies at least think it might be a good idea to “invade” our country and our 100% Pure brand as you can see in the video below…

Some local councils own and manage i-SITEs, operate visitor websites, have tourism development employees and promote and manage events or festivals that attract visitors.

The rationale being that prosperous tourism and hospitality businesses pay rates and therefore provide ongoing revenue for councils with the potential for further development.  Win-win right?

However with ever increasing costs and debt levels borne by councils, there is currently debate over whether Local Government should stick to their “core services”, meaning infrastructure of services like water, sewerage, roading etc.

TIANZ beleives that ‘tourism is core activity for local govt“, so we’re interested to hear what you think – from both rate payers and those with vested interest in the tourism industry.

What activities related to tourism do you think local government should be involved with?

Should each council have the ability to determine their policy according to their regions needs rather than being guided by legislation? Let us know what you think.

Take Our Poll on this subject below, or you you have more detailed thoughts, add a comment at the bottom of the post.

It was estimated in 2008 that 177,700 international wine lovers visited N.Z. wineries and there were a total of just under half a million individual trips to a winery. In 2007-2008 international wine tourists stayed longer on average and spent on average $3,543 – this is higher than the average spend per trip for all international visitors ($2,710). Of all international wine tourists, 19% spent more than $5,000 on their trip in N.Z. (see research here).

The wine industry could represent an even far greater value to the N.Z. tourism industry, growing positive brand awareness of N.Z.’s quality wine exports (the milestone of N.Z. exporting over $1 Bil in wine was achieved in July 2009), means that the premium positioning of NZ wine and a quality bottle of; Central Otago Pinot Noir, Waipara Pinot Gris, Waiheke Bordeaux blend, Hawke’s Bay Syrah, or Gisborne Chardonnay on restaurant tables and in the homes of our key visitor markets can translate to higher positive awareness of destination N.Z. and N.Z.’s regional differences.

Possibility is also that overseas consumers of N.Z. wine are our future travellers and draw comparisons between N.Z.’s wine industry raising sustainability standards as representative of N.Z.’s environmental sustainability as a whole?

The two industries are inextricably linked, however regionally differentiated wine tourism as a value creator has not been fully developed in our destination marketing and product development portfolio mix to-date.

I would be interested to discuss the potential to further develop food and wine tourism industry relationships, and regionally differentiated product development within N.Z. regions as a value creator…and know what other individuals thoughts are?

Likewise, failing to compare against the competitors, is burying one’s head in the sand. Closed loop comment systems may measure guest satisfaction in one sense, may even provide departmental diagnostics, but ignoring the public measure of such satisfaction represented by online reviews (or expecting your advertising or brand to overcome it) is like the old laughable question: who are you going to believe, me or your own lying eyes?
With the rise of self publishing on the internet, the monologue that has become more of a multilogue: a many to many conversation. Your customers, supporters and detractors talk amongst themselves and declare their views on you to anyone interested. The question is: are you listening to the right opinions? Are you responding?

Free Software
There is a plethora of free software available on the internet that can be utilised to track what is being said about you, your company, its products and services, your competitors, hype and buzz areas in the marketplace and valuable metrics which provide valuable information to track ROI and evaluative measures of current and future marketing and PR campaigns. The following are well worth more investigation and I implore you to do so:
• Google Alerts and Blog Alerts
• Tweet deck
• Yahoo Pipes
• Social Mention
• Technorati
• Blog pulse
• Signing up to the various OTA’s
If your organisation wants to track what’s being said by consumers about your company or brands on the internet, its best to monitor all forms of mouth media including but not limited to blogs, compliant sites, message boards, forums, news groups, and video sharing sites such as YouTube. Since it’s impossible to predict where or when important market intelligence will pop up on the web – or where it will be repeated, its best to do comprehensive monitoring of all possible sites. You should also monitor the myriad of existing and future social network sites, such as Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, LinkedIn….the list goes on.
For those starting to dabble with these social mediums, the manual and freely available search software is probably more than sufficient to get an idea of what is being is being virally spread throughout the web 2.0 world.

However, free search services can be costly in terms of time required to do daily searches. Since the free services do not store your clips as do most subscription media monitoring services, there is also the cost of printing out clips. Searching and managing these paper based clips is also much more difficult and time consuming than the digital clips subscription services store an online database.

Freely available tools provide no analysis, such as sentiment, geographic and demographic data, hype formulas, key sites and users, which means that the raw data may seem overwhelming with no apparent direction in how to use this data. With no strategy to utilise this new information stream, this data may ‘sit on the shelf’ rather than being utilised to develop and evaluate marketing plans and directions, as well as product and service development, social media strategies and developing new revenue streams.

The Automatic Solution
Constraints within the tourism and hospitality sectors do not always allow for leadership in tech tools. Limited margins of profit often prevent management from pursuing trends that are not perceived as proven paths to revenue.
Most businesses are familiar with the conveniences of technology in business analytics and show the willingness to invest in automated monitoring of important data when the return is proven. It seems illogical, then, to bypass investment in automated analytics for something influencing up to 66% of the travelling public, something that is seen by those readers to be more important than brand, website or advertising.
Mere counting without an analysis of context does not give an accurate or comprehensive sense of opinion. At worst, the insight can be outright wrong. With social networks changing the refresh rate of the current online corpus to hourly, and individuals publishing whenever they have something new to say, keeping that thermometer in the water is more important than ever.
There are various solutions for automated media monitoring that vary in price, reporting time and features. After many webinars, demos and trials, there are a few of the better ones listed below:
• Avalon
• Radian6
• Techrigy
• Brandseye
• Viralheat
• Symosos

Automated Solutions Must Pass a Few Tests

• Is it timely? Solutions that deliver results every 30 days do not recognise the urgency of the web. Receiving a report weekly or monthly, or checking each site monthly via manual audit, means reviews may quietly do damage for weeks without response or internal action.
• Is the solution affordable? Paying a disproportionate amount of revenue for an automated tool is not wise, especially in this economy. A formula would be to calculate hours used to monitor manually and the opportunity costs of what could be accomplished with the efficiency of technology, particularly where revenue generating team members are involved in the process.
• Are the most essential point of sale sites delivered? The key to any monitoring system is drilling down where the buying decisions are made. If your system does not monitor the critical sites for web revenue, namely Expedia, Travelocity, Priceline, Hotels.com and Orbitz, it may not be as helpful as one might needs. Monitoring other key commentary sites like Tripadvisor or Travelpost is important because of their penetration into the sales cycle.
• Is your performance measured against your competitors? This is critical because it’s how consumers view reviews. No one scans down a list of hotels on Expedia without noticing the traveller opinion score or the star ratings. Knowing how your market share of satisfaction compares to your competitors is as critical for operations as market share of revenue is to sales and revenue management. Armed with this information, capital dollars, training dollars and staff focus may be more easily brought to bear on quality results.
• Does the system provide enabling and supportive tools? An automated tool should make it easier to analyse data, make it easier to discuss in meetings with intuitive graphics, make responding reviews more streamlined, and should offer excellent support for users. Ultimately, an automated monitoring tool should assist in focusing the service culture of the property.

You may feel that this idle chatter originates from squeaky wheels with too much time on their hands. But whether the opinions are expressed by perpetual malcontents or considered influencers does not change the fact that your public is reading these views written by the people who experience your brand. A full 41 percent of bloggers frequently post about brands they love or hate. Their views are sharing the views of their readers.

Opinion monitoring with effective filtering gives you more precise readings. Only then can you see whether a negative opinion on your topics of interest is widespread, an anomaly, or a canary in a coalmine.

Afterthoughts
The era when business could shape what gets written about them seems to be over at least in the online domain due to the voice available to a common person at a very nominal cost. Social software is changing the way information gets reported online. Social media continues to grow in importance. Hotels and tourist operations that take advantage of these trends will see significant benefits in terms of online placement and revenue.
To develop an effective social marketing strategy and to inform and evaluate existing traditional mediums for marketing efforts, it is essential that business have the finger on the pulse when it comes down to ownership of the brand and feedback/reviews in relation to its offerings and competitors. Would you agree a deal without having the necessary information in any other business task?
For many organisations, the free software is a good start. However, the data can become overwhelming with no apparent direction in how to utilise the information. Additionally, with budgets under pressure, the temptation may to be to seek out the service that appears to be the least expensive. As with many products, however, what appears inexpensive on the surface may have hidden costs
Sources:
www.avalonreport.com
www.cyberalert.com
www.htrends.com
JRPG Consulting

Related Articles in this series by Steve Wilson:

Social Media is Everywhere

Online Reviews and Bookings

Hospitality and tourism marketers must understand that their guests are going online in increasing numbers and that in their electronic universe these consumers are exposed to and are likely influenced by the many sites devoted to the selling or discussion of travel and tourism. Tourism and hospitality marketers and managers should take the lead in understanding and utilising the emerging technologies, rather than being driven by the adoption of strategies by their competitors.

The reality of public involvement in traveller reviews has dramatically altered the way customer loyalty and satisfaction must be compared at the property level. It is no longer acceptable to measure satisfaction and team performance based on a closed loop model of customer feedback alone, namely the traditional comment card. Guest comments are now public, as are quality ratings, and failing to apply team accountability for public commentary, or failing to measure up against your competitive set, are like ignoring rate positioning in a crowded marketplace.
The fear inherent in these changes is understandable. Hospitality and tourism operators are accustomed to quiet, private complaints. For years, complaints have come by letter, phone call or other private interaction, including a closed-loop comment card. The internet has unmasked the truth behind reputation and brand. It has put public scrutiny to work on private business matters.
Fanning the fires of this change is the amazing credibility afforded to web reviews by potential guests and customers, the highest credibility in the consumer arena. In fact, 88% of those reading them say reviews contribute to their ultimate hotel selection. Additionally, review users consider what they read to be almost twice as important as brand or reputation in their decision. As consumers become more web savvy, and as the economy drives them to more comparison shopping, the visible quality measurement provided by consumer feedback and ratings will increase in influence.
Consider Tripadvisor as an example of the new public reality of tourism and hospitality comments that has shattered the quiet complaint model. Tripadvisor boasts 32 million unique visitors per month, 10 million members and houses 20 million reviews and opinions on 400,000 hotels and attractions. They are not alone in influence. Hotel.com has 1 million reviews, Priceline.com delivers Zagat reviews in addition to their own and the new search engine by Microsoft, Bing, targeted to give Google a run for its money, delivers reviews from Travelpost when a hotel is searched.
According to Tripadvisor, 57% of consumers will not book a hotel unless they have read reviews. Other source statistics put the total influence from 42% to 66%, but one trend is clear; the amount of consumers relying on reviews is growing. With Jupiter Research confirming that consumers using these reviews consider them more important than brand or reputation the public comments housed on third party sites have become a major player in the buying decision. If these reviews do not bear out their emotional attachment with the brand, they will stay elsewhere.
Consumer reviews and user generated content still dominates the tourism and hospitality’s view of social media. While the consumer reviews are absolutely critical and a potential gold mine for hotels running good operations, social media extends way beyond consumer reviews into several other social media channels.

REGIONAL VISITOR MONITOR
The Regional Visitor Monitor (RVM) confirms that New Zealand travellers are increasingly using the internet to book more than just accommodation. Online accommodation bookings by RVM respondents have increased from 42% to 58% since 2007, while phone bookings have fallen from 44% to 30%.Online activity and attraction bookings by RVM respondents have increased from 55% to 62% since 2007, while phone bookings have fallen from 24% to 19%.
Another key result is that domestic travellers are upping the amount of research they are doing before they visit a destination. Pre-trip research has increased by 39% since 2007, and much of this is being done online. Mr Bassett said that these findings show that tourism operators in all areas of the industry needed to get their inventory web-ready and keep their web content fresh and relevant.

YIELD-RELEVANT TOURIST DECISION MAKING
This research is part of a wider study, “Enhancing the spatial dimensions of tourism yield” led by Professor David Simmons and funded by the Foundation for research, science and technology, in which I was involved with the data collection and initial analysis of the findings. The objective of the study was to develop an in-depth understanding of international tourist decision-making processes, with emphasis on understanding itinerary, activity and expenditure choices.
One of the key findings was that social networks are to play a vital role in tourism marketing. The report emphasised that while international tourists exhibit some locked in behaviour such as transport choice, accommodation selection and length of stay, all of which are generally organised prior to arrival in NZ, there are many decisions which remain open, such as choice of activities and daily purchasing decisions.
I would add that not only does social media act to inform, persuade and reinforce decisions while international tourists are travelling in New Zealand, but the expanded web and social presence means that through the tourist process of utilising review and other social mediums, your products and services may be accessed prior to arrival in New Zealand, becoming booked before arrival or at least, included in the decision set to be confirmed once in the country.

PHD FINDINGS (to date)
Although only half way through the research, there are some notable key trends in relation to the international visitors use of social media networks:

• 65% visited review sites before travelling to NZ
• 35% searched microblogging sites before visiting NZ
• 67% post comments on a regular basis on a at least one social network site as they travel
• 67% stated that they were more likely to complain about a negative aspect of their trip via online mediums vs. directly with the business
• 54% used review and social network sites while travelling in NZ to either investigate there activity and accommodation options or to reduce their decision set.

The proliferation of content and social media means that technology holds the key. Many small to medium sized operators may have access to some of the free tools, but the lack of knowledge and experience to know what to do with these tools and the data they mine. These businesses need assistance to get the most out of network reporting software.

See the next article in this series by Steve Wilson “Social Media Monitoring“

Social media is global, real‐time, uncontrollable and dynamic. And every company has to face the fact that customers are talking online. Maybe they’re discussing and solving a product issue you don’t even know about yet, or whether to buy from you or your competition.

Social Media Phenomenon
The era when business could shape what gets written about them seems to be over at least in the online domain due to the voice available to a common person at a very nominal cost. Social software is changing the way information gets reported online. Almost anyone with an inclination to write and with access to internet connection can potentially get their message across. Social media continues to grow in importance. It has not only become one of the critical tools to interact with the customer but is also considered on the key elements impacting organic search and ranking for all business. Hotels and tourist operations that take advantage of these trends are seeing significant benefits in terms of online placement and revenue.

It’s already affecting a range of business firms, from software, to hotels and restaurants, manufacturing or hardware, to name just a few. This new trend has all the signs of being durable and requires serious thinking on the part of businesses, as to how to handle it. Gathering customer feedback online is going to become important and some firms are already doing it, either through mining the net or through their own official blogs. Not only gathering data is going to be important but also being proactive about the issues the data might throw up.

Companies that do not watch the ‘social software spectrum’ are actually missing out on market intelligence and other behavioural and trend information, which is pertinent to their marketing strategies and is freely available.

Hospitality and tourism operators find the issue of critical importance for the following reasons:

• hospitality and tourism product offerings, as intangible goods, cannot be evaluated before their consumption, thus elevating the importance of interpersonal influence;
• many hospitality and tourism products are seen as high risk purchases, for which the emotional risk or reference group evaluation is an important aspect of the decision making process;
• hospitality and tourism products are both seasonal and perishable, raising marketing stress levels for providers;
• the hospitality and tourism industry is intensely competitive, suggesting that the use of online interpersonal influence may provide important competitive advantages for early adopters;
• and finally, considering the dearth of hospitality and tourism industry specific literature related to the issue, it would appear that the industry lags behind others in the development and discussion of strategies for managing interpersonal influence in an electronic environment. An increasing number of companies are already putting the mechanisms in place to monitor the web and it may be prudent for many others to follow the same course.

SOCIAL MEDIA IS GAME CHANGING

It’s game changing because it is shifting the power to define and control a brand from the traditional institution to the individual or community. With each day that goes by, the ownership of all brands is gradually becoming the domain of the user.

SOCIAL MEDIA IS NOT JUST ANOTHER MEDIA

Social media is not like other forms of traditional media. Traditional nodes of communication travel one-way, usually between the brand and its customers or potential users. Social media bonds networks of people with a digital medium enabling them to interact with the content. Brand messages are personally interpreted, shared and conversed between friends and people who’ve been given permission to enter into discussions about common interests.

SOCIAL MEDIA IS MORE THAN BLOGS

Social media is defined by the act of sharing content in and between social networks regardless of the content type. Blogs may have recently attracted mainstream interest to online networks but various social media have been around for years. In the beginning, there were discussion forums and opinion sites, and now it has morphed to include: video sharing, photo sharing and microblogging. Social network sites such as MySpace, Facebook and Twitter are driving the social nature of the medium, along with the key review sites, such as Tripadvisor, Expedia, Hotels.com and Kayak.

SOCIAL MEDIA IS DECENTRALISED AND REAL TIME

Users of social media share a lot more than just their opinion. Those who enter the social media domain have left behind a lot of clues about who they are and how they think via information found in social bookmarks, comments, engagement, influence, friends, followers, downloads, favourites, views, votes and links. From all of these user actions, you can measure what’s important, what ideas are gaining ground and who, or what, is having the biggest impact on your products, services and brands.

SOCIAL COMPONENTS DRIVE BUSINESS RESULTS

• By monitoring social media, companies can track how their messages are being interpreted in the marketplace to understand how the company is perceived and to learn how any responses or message changes should be approached. This will also provide valuable insight into potential threats from competitors, changing industry trends and customer preferences. Monitoring also enables companies to track the evolution of known trends in order to quantify the ones gaining the most attention and acceptance within their target audience.
• Measurement provides the qualitative reporting data on the specific issues and buzz driving media coverage making it easy to demonstrate the impact of PR and marketing efforts.
• But social media also calls for a discovery approach, in which companies learn what influences are driving the internet discussions in the marketplace. From this, companies can measure the growth of many emerging trends and identify ideas for new products and opportunities to improve their current ones.
• With this knowledge, and the data points to support the decisions, companies can improve their levels of engagement with customers by employing new marketing tactics to participate effectively in the conversations that are occurring around them. Working with customers to build and expand the brands together, companies can harness the new influence that is driving the way purchase decisions are being made today.

See the Next Article in this series by Steve Wilson – “Online Reviews and Bookings“

There are mixed comments from the regions as to whether tourism operators have benefited, in this NZ Herald article numbers are still reported as “patchy” in the Auckland Region but a successful summer for tourism in Northland.

Do these numbers indicate we are out of the recession for the tourism industry?  Are arrivals a good indicator anyway?  If arrivals are dominated by low spending Aussies then how much economic benefit is there really when they often stay with friends and family?

So by and large it is still questionable as to whether the recession is over, but it could certainly be worse and these statistics may indicate it’s likely we can look forward to continual improvement in arrivals.  Let hope we can continue to lure back more of the lucrative travellers from the UK, Europe and US markets.

What’s it been like for your tourism business or region this summer?  Have you had to cut back prices to increase your bookings?  What are your expectations for the 2010?

A clear indication that all sectors, businesses and organisations in the New Zealand Tourism industry should be focused on providing an automated online booking and payment option for their customers to easily book online.  See more details about the online booking research here.

To find out more about the different online booking systems available in the New Zealand market read this post I wrote in August 2009: Online Booking Strategy for Tourism Operators.