Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
GAP model which identifi ed the areas where tourism organizations can focus (and rationalize)
their efforts. Importantly, Kaplan and Norton (1992) developed The Balanced Scorecard,
which stands as one of the most infl uential models for benchmarking organizations and
which identifi es a process to evaluate performance based upon a series of inputs, processes and
outputs. Additionally, Wöber (2002) wrote
Benchmarking in Tourism and Hospitality Industries
,
which
offered new conceptual and analytical tools for defi ning and evaluating hospitality and
tourism organizations including DMOs.
During this time, leading tourism organizations such as Destination Marketing Association
International (DMAI), Tourism Canada (now called The Canadian Tourism Commission),
Tourism Australia, the European Travel Commission and European Cities Marketing (ECM)
began developing guidelines and tools needed to support destination evaluation. For example,
DMAI has developed a series of measure that can be used by DMOs to assess (and benchmark)
performance across a range of activities within the organization. Tourism Canada offers the
Canadian tourism industry a variety of cutting-edge tools to support knowledge creation
including an online library, interactive tools to access online marketing data, and to facilitate
connections between and among travel fi rms/organizations located throughout the country (see,
for example, http://en-corporate.canada.travel/resources-industry/tools); similarly, the Australian
tourism offi ce has developed a toolbox enabling destinations to conduct research and to evaluate
alternative marketing strategies (see http://www.tourism.australia.com/en-au/industry/toolkits.
aspx). The Laboratory for Community and Economic Development and the National Laboratory
for Tourism and eCommerce, the University of Illinois (now located at Temple University),
developed a series of online tools which enable destination marketing organizations to assess
their competitiveness, their capacity to develop as a tourism destination and to benchmark
themselves against other convention and visitor bureaux within the state (http://community
development.uiuc.edu/). Last, the European Travel Commission, along with the Austrian
Tourism Organization and MODUL University, Vienna supports the development of TourMIS,
which was implemented in 2000 and is used by many European DMOs as a primary tool for
assessing European travel trends (
http://www.tourmis.info
) (
Wöber
2003).
Emergence of a new marketing paradigm
As suggested above, the many forces of change have heavily impacted all facets of the tourism
industry - they have fundamentally changed how travellers experience travel, how destinations
market themselves and, in turn, how the tourism industry develops and measures its success.
Evidence of this restructuring is manifest in many ways, none more so that in an article by
Gretzel (2012) entitled
Travel in the Network: Redirected gazes, ubiquitous connections and new frontiers
wherein she used, like Castells (1996), the 'network' as a metaphor to describe the various
systems that have fundamentally change the travel experience; and in articles by McCabe and
Stokoe (2010) and MacKay and Vogt (2012), who suggest that there is a huge 'spillover effect'
which links our daily lives, both in terms of how we behave and our use of technology, and the
way we experience travel. These articles are essential in that they clearly explain the formation
of new models of travel behaviour, new models for product design and new models for research
and evaluation which, in turn, establishes a new paradigm of tourism marketing.
As suggested by Gretzel (2012) and others (see for example, Gretzel
et al
. 2006; Wang and
Fesenmaier 2012), travel today differs substantially from travel 50 years ago when mass tourism
began in earnest. Indeed, it appears that the change in travel follows in parallel to the 'stages of
change' model proposed by Contractor, Wasserman and Faust (2006) and Gretzel, Yuan and
Fesenmaier (2000) regarding the impact of technology on organizations (Gretzel and Fesenmaier
