Destination marketers: do you really understand the traveler?

Sound-bite:
Do we really know how and why people determine where to travel to?

It is not at all clear that destination marketers really understand the traveler market.

Today we now know with a significant degree of certainty that ‘content’ is not what we thought it to be; in a destination world one needs to enter into the ongoing audience defined conversations to position places.

I have spent the last 17 years of so of my life trying to understand traveller decision-making and whilst I have learned much, certain of my views have never changed, from my first observations.

Here is an industry which has borrowed concepts from almost every other discipline many of which are irrelevant and most not aligned to the actual decision making process of visitors and travellers.

Arguably the phenomenal growth in the visitor industry has more to do with growth and global enhancement of the middle class socio-economic condition and ever decreasing real costs of air travel than any efforts on the part of destination marketers to induce demand.

I was listening to a presentation the other day by a purportedly excellent National Tourism regional manager who confidently informed the meeting that the particular destination suffered from a ‘consideration’ problem; that in the demand (attrition curve) the steepest decline was from interest to consideration and then from consideration to conversion.

‘You have got to be kidding me’ I thought to myself. How, in this day and age, can someone be taken seriously when they quote and are informed by the so called ‘funnel’. A concept that is highly discredited and one that has no empirical validity.

In further discussion it became noticeable, as this person rolled out a number of clichés with the so-called evidence, that we were all actors in a performance of ‘Myth making and sustaining’ directed by our erstwhile region manager

I have heard so many fallacies over the years that it drives me to distraction:

• Americans don’t travel long haul in years of Presidential elections
• Our strong currency’ impacts arrivals
• The price of air fares reduces demand
• Distribution is the key success factor
• On-line now drives tourism demand

Etc. etc.

There are four things that are obvious to me:

• Many marketers don’t take the time to do what they are paid to; understand the consumer / traveller / visitor (in this case).
• Most marketers (and travel marketers in particular) are unaware of the significant insights based on factual evidence of consumer behavior that have emerged over the last few years.
• In an age where emphasis is placed more on making things simple that the integrity of the statement many people fallen into the trap of becoming simplistic.
• People often don’t do the basics to check and understand.

Let me amplify, by firstly looking at the fallacies presented above. These so called insights are highly questionable and should be obviously incorrect to all tourism marketers:

• Americans do indeed travel in election years. A simple historical spread sheet (data published by OTTI) shows conclusively that presidential elections have no bearing on travel where it be domestic, inter-regional nor long haul
• Historic Reserve bank exchange rate and tourism arrivals data (both sets available for most OECD countries) _ allows one to isolate global, regional, and country (both destination and source) trends. Simple correlations and statistics tests on elasticity shows that, other than for hyper inflation, exchange rate has little bearing on demand.
• The airfare argument is fallacious; in relative terms, demand has grown substantively as the price of airfares have in real terms has substantively and sharply declined. Increases as a result of increased taxes etc., have no statistical impact whatsoever on correlations.
• Distribution, and the industry’s fixation on it, stems from the retail paradigm which drove the industry demand in the 1960’s; this influence has been sustained from thereon mostly by National Tourism Board offices as they struggle to ensure they have a relevant foreign office network.
• There is no such thing a physical distribution of product and front end representation, akin to ‘shelf facings’ , it no longer as applicable as it once was.
• Our own assessment of over 30 NTO’s showed that whether the country had in-market representation (servicing the distribution trade) or whether co-operative campaigns were done with wholesalers or not, in no way affected visitor arrivals.
• The gravitation toward on-line travel processes would be exponential and self evident; , after all , no physical product exchange in the distribution channel is required. One only had to read the ‘The long tail’ by Chris Anderson to work out that the so called ‘physical distribution channel’ so well nurtured by the tourism industry was a prime candidate for transformation.
• Importantly however, and here is the real issue, travel marketers have not investigated traveller decision-making and in probably most cases have little idea of how people think. As a consequence destination marketers have never really isolated and understood that internet usage and growth centers on booking which has a limited impact on and provides marginal stimuli in destination selection.

I am sure that there are travel marketers out there who do understand the visitor decision making process, but my guess is they are few and far between.

Only when the visitor industry comes to grips with and understands traveller decision making will destinations benefit from the substantial investments made by tax-payers into destination marketing.

As a start, it would be a gigantic step forward for mankind, if the marketers at least recognized that they are dealing in a ‘high engagement’ ‘product and services category

Even if they just read the published works of Douglas Holt, in this area (Cultural marketing) they could make a significant difference to re-shaping industry behavior and doing what they get paid to do – induce demand.