Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
metrics will be reviewed. However, the real test of what works and what doesn't in terms of
tourism marketing, both for online and more traditional marketing campaigns, is whether the
marketing drives potential tourists to visit and spend at the destination.
Deciding what to measure
DMOs tend to be funded by the public sector and hence ultimately answer to resident taxpayers.
In the United States for example, some State Governments impose hotel/bed taxes where the
tax revenue gained is earmarked for the marketing activities of DMOs, signalling a direct link
between the DMO, tourists and the public. They are often quasi public organizations and need
to justify their public funding (Morgan
et al
. 2012). DMOs increasingly have a coordinating role
and facilitate private sector tourism operators to market their products. They are only partly
responsible for marketing the destination, since the private sector also advertise and market
their individual products. So attributing destination success as a result of a DMO marketing
strategies becomes even more complicated. Yet evaluating DMO effectiveness is important
because it is more diffi cult to attribute consumer decisions to marketing actions vis-à-vis
alternative information sources.
In contrast to the publically funded DMOs, the private sector tourism operations, such as
hotels, resorts and airlines generally have better access to sales and performance data internally.
They are able to directly isolate the success of the marketing campaigns in infl uencing occupancy
rates/passenger load factors and sales. Alternatively, some of these operations will outsource the
implementation of their marketing campaigns to third party organizations or marketing
intermediaries who may include an evaluation component that is built into the marketing
programme. For example, hotels will often use Online Travel Agents (OTA) to help sell their
rooms (Anderson 2011; Page and Connell 2009). Examples of some of the more well-known
international OTAs are Expedia.com, Travelocity.com and Orbitz.com. Even though the hotel
would prefer to sell the rooms directly through their own website, so they can retain a higher
proportion of the sale, OTAs are an important distribution channel. Based on where the hotel
guest made the booking, the hotel or airline then pays commission to the OTA. Hence, within
the private sector, there may be fewer marketing research or evaluation projects needed.
Tasci and Williams (2007) argue that the ultimate goal of destination marketing is to attract
tourists by infl uencing their travel decision-making and choice to travel to the destination. Yet
before tourists travel to a destination, there is a process of consumer decision making. Different
consumers will be at different stages of buyer readiness. Kotler
et al
. (2009) list these buyer
readiness states as: awareness; knowledge; liking; preference; conviction; and purchase. Often,
tourism marketing objectives seek to address different stages of buyer readiness, that is, they seek
to raise awareness of the destination, increase potential tourists' knowledge of the destination,
create a favourable impression of the destination in the mind of potential tourists, build
destination preference or ultimately convert the potential tourists to a visitor to the destination.
For each target group, DMOs ought to evaluate the effectiveness of their marketing to push the
potential tourists further toward visiting the destination. Both the intermediate objectives of the
buyer readiness state and the ultimate objective of increased tourist visits need to be evaluated.
The decision on what criteria or KPIs that DMOs will be assessed and evaluated on and which
evaluation instrument will be used should encompass both.
Measuring the effectiveness of destination marketing campaigns is complex (Morgan
et al
.
2012). The reasons for this are numerous and have been highlighted previously in the literature.
One of the reasons for the complexity is that destinations comprise numerous stakeholders
including private and public sector organizations, each with their own objectives and different
