Diversifying a Tourist Destination through Experiences: The Case of Long Lake, the Adirondack Park, New York

Demand for experiences is a major trend in the tourism industry that came as a response to commoditization of services. As many destinations have similar (or same) services in place, it became difficult for travelers to diversify one destination from another. What is nowadays happening is that travelers are no longer satisfied with traditional services only and instead seek something that they did not have a chance to experience elsewhere. Challenge that destinations consequently face is to answer travelers\u27 demand for diversified experiences and at the same time to differentiate themselves from their competition. Hence, this study addresses how destinations can differentiate through experiences. Specifically, the study describes Destination Experience Differentiation Model for recommending strategies to differentiate a destination through experiences and uses Long Lake as the case destination. As such the study will serve as a useful model to other destinations dealing with commoditization

Experiential marketing of tourism destinations

Destinations are combination of tourism products, offering an integrated experience to consumers (Buhalis, 1999). Research shows that demand for experiences is a major trend in the tourism industry. Schneider (2004) briefly defined experiential travel as a travel that enriches the soul while broadening the mind . Tourists are no longer satisfied with traditional services only - they want to go beyond that and have therefore created demand for diversified experiences (Banff Lake Louise Tourism, 2005). This increasing demand for experiences shows that it is no longer enough for destinations to compete with their facilities and amenities, but instead they need to create differentiating experiences if they want to attract today\u27s travelers (Banff Lake Louise Tourism, 2005). The purpose of this paper is to examine the issue of experiential marketing in tourism destinations in particular concerning how it can be used as a form of differentiation. Specifically, the study describes the application of the experience concept to a destination suffering from the challenges of commoditization. This discussion identifies the primary benefit of experiential diversification is as a guide to move away from promoting physical destination attributes towards a goal of promoting emotional attributes that generate lasting and unique memories for visitors. Challenges primary relate to the institutional capacity needed to lead a destination towards understanding, identifying, creating and delivering a unique experience across the complete tourism system

The pricing of European airbnb listings during the pandemic: A difference-in-differences approach employing COVID-19 response strategies as a continuous treatment

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a major shock to the global tourism industry. Given its peculiarity, this paper analyzes one of the most intriguing questions in the Airbnb literature – the pricing of Airbnb listings – by taking advantage of a difference-in-differences methodology that largely draws on variations in country-level policy responses to the pandemic. Relying on a dataset containing weekly information from 130,999 continuously active listings across 27 European countries from 2019 to 2020, this study first investigates the exogenous impact of response policies (proxied by the COVID-19 Stringency Index) on demand. Secondly, accounting for the endogeneity of both demand and prices, this research analyzes pricing responses to demand variations. Results show that: i) increases in the COVID-19 Stringency Index cause significant declines in Airbnb demand; ii) in- creases in demand cause, on average, increases in Airbnb prices; and iii) pricing strategies between commercial and private hosts differ substantially

sj-docx-1-jht-10.1177_10963480221125130 – Supplemental material for Forecasting Tourism in the EU after the COVID-19 Crisis

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-jht-10.1177_10963480221125130 for Forecasting Tourism in the EU after the COVID-19 Crisis by Ulrich Gunter, Egon Smeral and Bozana Zekan in Journal of Hospitality & Tourism Research</p