I attended an interesting talk last week by Ian Yeoman of VisitScotland’s Scenario Planning Department. The presentation was about Space Tourism and how this fits in with work identifying how Scotland’s tourists are evolving in their behaviour and desires.
A factual overview of the talks can be found in the news reports here and the accompanying Virgin Videos here but I thought I would use this space to touch on a couple of points not really developed in the news reports .
The first point was the phenomenon Ian identified as ‘fly EasyJet, stay at Gleneagles’ within the luxury market. It is often assumed that people staying in a top hotel will also pay top dollar for every other aspect of their trip (including transport) although Ian’s work suggests that it’s actually a more complex equation – essentially balancing the maximising of time spent doing what the customer really values and wants to be doing (e.g. being pampered at Gleneagles) against the minimising of the time needed to get to what they really want to be doing (and if this means that Easyjet is the best way of doing this, then so be it.)
What I’m not sure about is what this means for hotels based close to a space base: does it mean that people (such as the enthusiasts, driven by an interest in space and the science) aren’t necessarily looking for luxury accommodation or will luxury accommodation be an essential aspect for those seeking a once in a lifetime experience?
The second point I thought was worth developing was how Virgin either have some bright sparks working for them (which they undoubtedly do!) or how thoroughly they had done their qualitative research (which I’m pretty sure they would have done as well).
The reason I say this is that the whole Virgin experience is packaged in a very user-friendly way – even though it is the end results of many hours of techies hunched over diagrams, interpreting re-entry parabolas and so forth, Virgin have realised that the key to making this work is ‘access.’
What do I mean by ‘access’? Put simply, they are making it easier for their customers to do the things they really care about.
For a start, the price is not bad and so this makes the venture accessible to more people. I couldn’t afford the £100 000 or whatever it is but I’m sure there are more people that can afford that than the £millions needed to travel with the Russians.
Secondly, you don’t need to take a year out of your life (unlike a Russian mission). It’s not quite walking up to the front desk and away you go but its pretty close. They appreciate the importance of minimizing the inconvenience of training – whereas the current alternatives for budding space tourists are akin to having to take a course in seamanship if you ever wanted to take a ferry to Shetland.
Virgin also cleverly minimise other negatives that I think many people associate with space travel, burning up on re-entry and being strapped into pretty un-ergonomic surroundings with some horrid suit the size of a shed. The videos show people floating about in sleek Silver Surfer style uniforms (much more convenient and natural than having air canisters or something bulky strapped to you!) and, lets face it, if you’ve spent that much money travelling into space, not being allowed to float would be really really dumb.
It’s again making it easy for people to experience what they really want to do and not be tied down (literally?) to how things have been done in the past.
So what lessons does this have for the rest of the tourism industry? From a research perspective, it shows the importance of qualitative customer focused research and development. I don’t know whether Virgin did it or not but I can almost hear the voices of focus group participants as Virgin explain their offering and in a language that rarely comes though from purely quantitative work. One by one their promotional material address the fears and objections that I am sure they have listened to real people raise.
Tourism industry practitioners often overlook qualitative work as it is felt that there is safety in numbers from quantitative work. I think this is as good an example as any to show that listening to your customers on a deeper and more emotional level is also vital to developing and improving a product offering.
In many case this is informally done already in small tourism businesses but as it is often done by the proprietor with their guests as they leave/arrive, there is always the danger that the customer is being polite when responding and not telling the truth.
Harnessed correctly, qualitative research can deliver insight to help tourism business owners make it as easy as possible for customers to do what they really want to do. In other words, improving access to all areas.
So lessons from space as to how to use qualitative research findings on the ground!
This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 28th, 2007 at 6:59 am and is filed under Space tourism, Tourism market research. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.