Les exportateurs d'arachide de bouche des pays du Sud pénalisés par les nouvelles normes sur l'aflatoxine édictées par l'Union européenne

Au nom du principe de précaution sanitaire, l'UE a édicté en 1998 une norme extrêmement restrictive en matière de tolérance aflatoxine (2 µg d'aflatoxine B1 ou 4 µg pour la somme des 4 aflatoxines B1 + B2 + G1 + G2) dans les fruits secs destinés à l'alimentation humaine. Mise en application depuis le 01/01/2001, sans progressivité, cette mesure met en péril les filières d'exportation d'arachide de bouche, notamment celles des pays ACP, techniquement mal préparés pour réagir efficacement. Elle génère des surcoûts importants de mise aux normes, de contrôle et de formation nécessitant des moyens financiers conséquents, ce qui implique une action conjointe des organisations internationales du commerce, de la santé et de l'éducation. Le Cirad cherche à tout mettre en oeuvre pour aider les pays producteurs les moins préparés à une réglementation aussi sévère. (Résumé d'auteur

NETOUR: A EUROPEAN NETWORK FOR EXCELLENCE IN TOURISM THROUGH ORGANIZATIONS AND UNIVERSITIES IN RUSSIA

Russia is one of the fastest growing tourism markets (+8% growth in 2011) with many resources that are yet untapped. This paper presents NETOUR, a project of European and Russian universities that aims at boosting Russia’s competitiveness as a tourism destination. The purpose of this project, funded by the European Commission through a TEMPUS grant, is to propose a model for cooperation between universities and the main stakeholders in the tourism sector, in order to favour its sustainable development. Following a situation analysis of tourism in Russia, both from a supply and demand side, the researchers conduct an analysis of the gaps that exist between what Russian universities propose in tourism management education and what tourism professionals expect from higher education training and the competences they need to succeed. The results lead to university curriculum revisions on the one hand, and continuing education proposals on the other hand. The pillars that support NETOUR are: (1) Knowledge transference between Universities and society: facilitating the adoption of innovations by tourism firms, as well as reinforcing students’ employability; (2) Lifelong learning: identifying tourism professionals\u27 knowledge, updating needs, and proposing specialized training according to their requests; (3) Open dialogue between the various stakeholders in the sector (i.e., policy makers, entrepreneurs, local population, alumni, students, professors, professional associations, etc.); (4) Design of new tourism management curricula according to the real educational needs of the sector. This ambitious three-year project should yield benefits for all tourism sector stakeholders and lead to improving the competitiveness of Russia as a tourism destination

NETOUR: A EUROPEAN NETWORK FOR EXCELLENCE IN TOURISM THROUGH ORGANIZATIONS AND UNIVERSITIES IN RUSSIA

Russia is one of the fastest growing tourism markets (+8% growth in 2011) with many resources that are yet untapped. This paper presents NETOUR, a project of European and Russian universities that aims at boosting Russia’s competitiveness as a tourism destination. The purpose of this project, funded by the European Commission through a TEMPUS grant, is to propose a model for cooperation between universities and the main stakeholders in the tourism sector, in order to favour its sustainable development. Following a situation analysis of tourism in Russia, both from a supply and demand side, the researchers conduct an analysis of the gaps that exist between what Russian universities propose in tourism management education and what tourism professionals expect from higher education training and the competences they need to succeed. The results lead to university curriculum revisions on the one hand, and continuing education proposals on the other hand. The pillars that support NETOUR are: (1) Knowledge transference between Universities and society: facilitating the adoption of innovations by tourism firms, as well as reinforcing students’ employability; (2) Lifelong learning: identifying tourism professionals\u27 knowledge, updating needs, and proposing specialized training according to their requests; (3) Open dialogue between the various stakeholders in the sector (i.e., policy makers, entrepreneurs, local population, alumni, students, professors, professional associations, etc.); (4) Design of new tourism management curricula according to the real educational needs of the sector. This ambitious three-year project should yield benefits for all tourism sector stakeholders and lead to improving the competitiveness of Russia as a tourism destination

International Visitors’ Personal Involvement Levels A Factor-Cluster Segmentation Analysis

Involvement, a widespread concept in marketing, leisure and recreation, has played a more limited role in tourism studies. The purpose of this research was to evaluate the influence of visitors’ personal and trip characteristics on the involvement dimensions in a tourism context, thereby offering a segmentation perspective of visitors’ involvement levels. The Involvement Profile scale was administered to 1000 international visitors in Mauritius at various beach resorts. The importance and pleasure dimensions merged to form the attraction dimension while risk probability items loaded as per the original scale. The results confirm the existence of different visitor groups based on involvement, but it is not yet conclusive whether the IP scale is applicable to visitors in a tourist destination context. Given the various results generated from the application of involvement scales in tourism contexts, there is a need to revisit the construct for visitors to tourist destinations using qualitative methodologies

Improving Service Experiences with Mobile Ethnography: The Case of two Attractions in Toronto

Introduction: Tourism destination competitiveness has been one of the main areas of research in the past twenty years (e.g., Dwyer & Kim, 2003; Enright & Newton, 2004; Ritchie & Crouch, 2003). The competitiveness of any destination relies, in part, on the quality of the customer experience that is delivered in its tourist attractions. More specifically, tourist satisfaction is based on visitors’ assessment of an experience as compared to their expectations. It is therefore essential for attractions to not only monitor visitor satisfaction, but also to continuously improve the design of the services and experiences that are provided. The purpose of this study was to conduct a service evaluation of two Toronto attractions with an innovative mobile ethnographic method. Literature: Tourism marketing is evolving at a fast pace. Because of rapid and recent technological advances (e.g., Internet access, web 2.0 technology and the ubiquity of smartphones), consumers are increasingly becoming the voice of destinations and tourist services (Dimanche, 2010). They voice their opinions in blogs, review and rate facilities, hotels, and restaurants, and share this information with pictures and videos on social media. We are shifting towards a peer-marketing approach where consumers are the most effective medium to communicate about a brand and the experiences it proposes (Buhalis & Law, 2008). As a result, it has become more important than ever for managers and marketers to focus on the quality of the experience and to work on experience design and improvement with their customers (Andrades & Dimanche, 2014). Service design has only been recently used in tourism management and tourism research (Dimanche, Keup, & Prayag, 2012; Stickdorn & Zehrer, 2009). In particular, a mobile ethnographic methodology was developed in Europe to provide destinations and service providers with alternative tool to consumer surveys that would provide richer and innovative information (Stickdorn & Frischhut, 2012). Methodology: This research uses an innovative methodology, mobile ethnography, to help improve the tourist experience in two Toronto attractions: the CN Tower and the Royal Ontario Museum. Service design is a customer-based approach to designing and improving visitor experiences. The methodology (Dimanche, Prayag, & Keup, 2014; Stickdorn & Frischhut, 2012) relies on volunteers to use their own smartphones to document their customer journeys through an App called ExperienceFellow (please visit experiencefellow.com for more information about the research tool). Other researchers have previously used and recommended mobile ethnographies (e.g., Hein, O\u27Donohoe, and Ryan, 2011; Tan, Foo, Goh, and Theng, 2009). Benefits of this method are that we can collect data on the service delivery site, at the time of service delivery, and in an unobtrusive way. About 50 students from a large urban university were asked to upload the App ExperienceFellow before a visit to (1) the CN Tower or (2) the Royal Ontario Museum. They were asked to identify and rate through the App the various touchpoints that mattered to them, either positively or negatively (i.e., on a 1 to 5 point scale), during the visit. By doing so, they built their own service journey and had to document each touchpoint with evidence recorded on their smartphone (i.e., a picture, a video, a text message, or a voice recording). Results: All information collected through the App was then uploaded on the ExperienceFellow server. Once all data were uploaded, the researchers could analyze the experiences through the eyes of the visitors, and make recommendations to the CN Tower and to the ROM for improvement. An application was used to graphically illustrate the visitor journeys with a storyboard including comments and testimonies made by visitors. As a result, researchers identified significant points of the service journey. Quality points to be emphasized and promoted, areas of improvement, significant problems were then synthesized in reports with recommendations for the attractions. Conclusions: This research responds to the conference call for helping destinations and attractions reimagine and reinvent customer experiences. It describes an innovative method that involves young visitors and their ability to easily use smartphones to address tourism service evaluation and identify significant service touch points, from the customers’ perspective, in the context of two urban attractions. Different from traditional service evaluation studies where visitors are asked to rate pre-identified items, this approach gives the subjects a free-hand in identifying touch points and in documenting not only how the touch points are evaluated and why, but also how the service can be improved. Rich audio-visual records of the visitor experience contribute to service improvement and service innovation. The Director of the Office of Tourism in Antibes Juan Les Pins found the tool and method useful and promising; he intends to propose to his board that this method be integrated into the DMO’s quality control process. References: Andrades, L., & Dimanche, F. (2014). Co-creation of experience value: A tourist behavior approach. In N. Prebensen, J. Chen, & M. Uysal (Eds.), Creating experience value in tourism (pp. 95-112). London: CABI. Buhalis, D., & Law, R. (2008). Progress in information technology and tourism management: 20 years on and 10 years after the Internet—The state of eTourism research. Tourism management, 29(4), 609-623. Dwyer, L., & Kim, C. (2003). Destination competitiveness: Determinants and Indicators. Current Issues in Tourism, 6(5), 369–413. Enright, M. J., & Newton, J. (2004). Tourism Destination Competitiveness: A Quantitative Approach. Tourism Management, 25 (6), 777–788. Dimanche, F. (2010). En quête de la génération “C”: Pour un nouvel agenda de recherche marketing et tourisme. [In search of the C-generation: Towards a new tourism marketing research agenda]. Mondes du Tourisme, 1(1), 30-38. Dimanche, F., Prayag, G., & Keup, M. (2014). Le service design dans le tourisme: Une approche ethnographique mobile [Service design in tourism: A mobile ethnographic approach]. Mondes du Tourisme Hors-Série [Special Issue], 32-42. Dimanche, F., Keup, M., & Prayag, G. (2012). What is service design? The service experience (Ch. 1.1). In M. Stickdorn and Birgit Frischhut (Eds.), Service Design and Tourism (pp. 11-14). Norderstedt, Germany: Books on Demand. Hein, W., O\u27Donohoe, S., & Ryan, A. (2011). Mobile phones as an extension of the participant observer\u27s self: Reflections on the emergent role of an emergent technology. Qualitative Market Research: An International Journal, 14(3). 258-273. Doi: 10.1108/13522751111137497 Ritchie, J. R. B., & Crouch, G.I. (2003). The Competitive Destination: A Sustainable Tourism Perspective. Wallingford, UK: CABI.Stickdorn, M., & Frischhut, B. (Eds.) (2012). Service Design and Tourism. Norderstedt, Germany: Books on Demand. Stickdorn, M., & Zehrer, A. (2009, October). Service design in tourism: Customer experience driven destination management. First Nordic Conference on Service Design and Service Innovation. Oslo, Norway. Tan, E.M.Y., Foo, S., Goh, D., & Theng, Y.L. (2007). An analysis of services for the mobile tourist. Proceedings of The International Conference on Mobile Technology, Applications and Systems, Singapore, September 10-12

Visitor Driven Service Experiences in a City Destination: A Mobile Ethnographic Approach

This paper reports on an innovative qualitative method, a mobile ethnography, where visitors are asked to use mobile technological devices such as smartphones to identify service gaps, evaluate service journeys, and help improve tourist services

Immigration and labor in tourism: The case of Canada

Canada has relied on a steady flow of immigrants throughout its modern existence, and that influx keeps growing. According to Tourism HR Canada, the increase in tourism demand leads to new jobs being created, especially in metropolitan areas. However, the current Canadian population is not able to fill the demand, and immigrants as a source of labor will become increasingly needed in the tourism and hospitality sector. The purpose of this paper is to ascertain the importance of immigration on the Canadian labor tourism market and its role in the tourism sector. Labor challenges are a threat to the destination competitiveness. This study relies on secondary data that were collected by Stats Canada. Increased immigration has a mitigating impact on shortages. Evidence strongly supports that immigration may be one of the major determinants to the successful growth of Canada’s tourism