30 research outputs found
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Borderland Tourism as an Indicator of National Travel
The subject of borders is core to international travel, yet remains an understudied component of tourism research. This paper evaluates the tourism performance of Canada’s premier border destination, Niagara Falls, to gain insight to the national market trend of declining U.S. visitation to Canada. An assessment of eight years of accommodation reservation data indicates that American visitors spend more, and stay longer than Canadian visitors to Niagara Falls. Thus, as bookings shift from Americans to Canadians, revenues per available room are negatively affected. This close examination of borderland reservations highlights the significant shift in tourism that can result from the macro effects of health and safety concerns, tighter custom regulations, and economic turmoil
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User-Generated Videos in Tourism Destination Marketing: Using Narrative Analysis to Deconstruct Video Travel Stories
The social media phenomenon has impacted travel and tourism marketing, creating new and exciting paths for destination promotion, and blurring the traditional roles of destinations as message producers, and consumers as message receivers. The goal of this paper is to explore the transition to C2C marketing, and to present a case study analysis of user-generated video in tourism destination promotion. This form of video story-telling calls for a new method of market research. Narrative analysis is applied
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Innovative Performance Measures to assess Destination Competitiveness
Many Destination Management Organizations (DMOs) have functionally expanded beyond their origins as information disseminators, to take on a more direct sales role, supported through innovative e-commerce capabilities. Central reservation systems (CRSs) not only provide DMOs with new sources of revenue, but additionally, the on-going accommodation and attraction booking process creates rich data bases that when mined, can provide DMOs with relevant and timely performance measures. While much has been written about destination competitiveness and industry performance, CRS data provides a relatively new source to tap. This paper mines data from 15 DMO reservation systems and presents new indices for measuring and benchmarking destination performance
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Exploring Canadians’ Social Media-based Advocacy to Inform Domestic Travel Recovery
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Packaging Travel on the Web: A Case Study of Ottawa Tourism
The advancement of Central Reservation Systems (CRSs) has provided Destination Marketing Organizations with sophisticated tools to operate effectively in today’s e-tourism environment. A growing segment of eTourism sales is travel packages. To assess the effectiveness of net packaging and to identify strategic opportunities provided by data collected through the process of package sales, the Ottawa Tourism CRS system and data warehouse is explored. Trends indicate the growth in net versus phone bookings, and package versus regular bookings. These are positive trends given that packages represent longer stays and higher expenditures, aligning with strategic directions of the destination
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DMO 2.0: Exploring residents’ national identification relationship to destination advocacy through social media
The present research seeks to understand the determinants of advocacy in a travel context, and explore advocacy behaviours using Facebook, a popular SNS platform for travel-based groups. Given national identification’s focus on creating a sense of pride and belongingness to one’s nation, it is proposed that the stronger one’s identification, the more that person will advocate for their home nation. Further, the link between identification and advocacy is hypothesized to be positively influenced by an individual’s destination image and tourism ethnocentrism. Findings demonstrate the importance of residents’ perceptions of various national values such as pride, closeness, and love of their country on their desire to advocate for it to others. Similarly, a favourable image of their country can strengthen this relationship. This mixed-method research combines an online survey with the emergent methodology of netnography to build upon social identity and place image theories. Implications for destination marketers are discussed
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Comparing the Influence on Trip Planning Behaviour of Using Selective “Place Appeal” Versus an “All Inclusive” Style in Destination Marketing
In the production of marketing materials, Destination Marketing Organization’s must make decisions about the prominence given to certain products and places, often to the exclusion of others. These decisions reflect political or market directions, or a mix of both. Yet, little is known about the influence on traveler behaviour of these decisions. This experimental design study compares trip planning behaviour of potential travelers using a vacation guide featuring regions with greatest appeal most prominently, versus a guide featuring all regions equally. Interestingly, a first position in a guide, or more pages of information, can have as much influence on trip planning as place appeal
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Beyond Tourism Destination Image: Mapping country image from a psychological perspective
To explore the structure of place image, this study maps consumer respondents’ mental schemata of place-related associations. An Integrated Schema of Place Image is developed through a process of categorizing and coding verbatim responses collected through a survey of Canadian consumers, to capture their Tourism Destination Image (TDI) and General Country Image (GCI) of the U.S. In the respondent’s mind, the U.S. image is most strongly associated with Country Characteristics (30% of responses), notably place names (e.g. New York). Canadians tend to associate country characteristics strongly with TDI, and also moderately with GCI. This suggests that change of the perceived overall characteristics of the U.S. could significantly influence both its GCI and TDI
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Residents as Destination Advocates: A Netnographic Exploration of Resident-Generated Advocacy through a Facebook Travel Group
Like many destinations, Canada began this year with an increase in international visitors (Destination Canada, 2019). An attributing factor to this growth is the phenomenon of social media and, more specifically, social networking sites (SNS) such as Facebook, which emphasize a user’s relationships, as supported by their conversations, identity, reputation, and presence (Kietzmann, Hermkens, McCarthy, & Silvestre, 2011; Kim & Fesenmaier, 2017). SNS are now deeply ingrained in our social and economic lives (Usui, Wei, & Funck, 2018; Zeng & Gerritsen, 2014), even surpassing traditional marketing channels in terms of importance and effectiveness (Burgess, Sellitto, Cox, & Buultjens, 2009; O’Connor, 2008; Soboleva, Burton, Mallik, & Khan, 2017). Of the most popular forms of SNS, Facebook stands out with 1.47 billion daily active users (Facebook, 2019), more than any other type of SNS. Within Facebook are a number of themed groups for users to connect and disseminate on a variety of shared-interest topics, including tourism. Residents are an important representation of the destination within these groups, by offering a more organic image as compared to information provided by destination marketers (Uchinaka, Yoganathan, & Osburg, 2019). Since tourism can be a high-risk purchase in the sense that it cannot be returned if a tourist is unhappy with it, there is a value to better understanding the determinants of SNS-based advocacy within a tourism lens. To date, few studies have explored the nuances of resident-generated advocacy through Facebook specifically.
The aim is to better understand SNS user\u27s motivations to advocate for their place of residence as a tourist destination using the emergent methodology of netnography. Netnography adapts ethnographic research within an online setting to better understand online cultures through users’ content (Mkono & Tribe, 2017) – in this case, travel-related pages within the Facebook platform. For this research, I will look at the Next Departure – Canada’s Travel Community Facebook group, which is comprised of 13,500 travel-minded individuals. The membership in this group is comprised largely of Canadian residents, many of whom act as unofficial advocates for Canada to other potential travelers. Advocacy goes beyond word-of-mouth (WOM) by incorporating both intentions and behaviours, and is measured by one’s social and physical advocacy, recommending behaviours, approval of others in visiting Canada, and positive WOM (Ghosh, 2018). Postings will be evaluated to identify indicators of advocacy behaviour among these residents, which include their sharing of photos/videos/GIFs, asking for recommendations, arranging get togethers with other travelers, posting about a particular feeling or activity, tagging friends, checking in to locations, starting a group poll, and tagging local events. Prior to engaging with any online content, this qualitative approach will ensure a strict adherence to the recommended ethical guidelines as outlined by the creator of this methodology (Kozinets, 2002). The data analysis process will involve coding the online data using extensive field notes as related to a user’s advocacy behaviours until the point of data saturation (Mkono & Tribe, 2017).
This research will advance knowledge by offering new insights into destination advocacy behaviour through SNS. In exploring advocacy, there is a great opportunity to build upon our current understanding of the effectiveness of resident-generated content in driving interest to a destination through digital technologies. In practice, this research will offer destination marketers with a better perspective of their shifting role from information provider to facilitator in today’s largely consumer-to-consumer-driven world
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Keep Exploring, Sharing, and Tweeting: Connecting Millennials, Social Media and Destination Canada’s Brand
Social media has become a powerful influencer in its ability to sway customer intentions and behaviors in an online setting. Given the importance of social media and its users in acting as information spreaders and disseminators, particularly in the context of global tourism, the goal of this research is to profile and/or understand youth travellers within the context of their social media behaviour. Using latent class analysis which helps to identify unobserved subgroups within a population, this study utilizes the rich dataset offered by Destination Canada which gives valuable traveler-focused information across the globe, including Brazil, China, Australia, Germany, South Korea, United Kingdom, and more. The results of this quantitative analysis reveal important differences based on age, explorer types and lifestyles, and geographic location as it relates to Canadian travel behaviors. By understanding what motivates these millennial-aged travelers particularly, destinations can create an environment where their actions are better anticipated and encouraged. The contribution of this original research is an empirically-informed view of how travelers share their experiences via social media