Tracking Tourism: The Tourism Research Blog Archive for the ‘Tourism market research’ Category

Travel and tourism research highlights - What have we learned in 2008?

It’s Christmas.  Time for peace and goodwill.  Hope and joy.

So lets put travel sector doom and gloom aside for a moment. There’s cheer to be found in reviewing our knowledge nugget collection! All those things that have been learned about digital tourism and online travel trends that we didn’t know this time last year.

With the help of all those smart analysts and researchers out there, I am determined to deliver you some  hope and joy in the form of information, insight and illumination.

Here are my four travel and tourism research picks from 2008 - and it is not all bad news.

1) Hitwise reports that the Economic downturn is benefiting budget Travel and Cruise companies.  They explain:

UK Internet traffic to travel websites fell by 4.6% between September 2007 and September 2008, but certain sectors are thriving despite, or in some cases because of, the squeeze on household budgets.

UK Internet visits to budget travel providers, such as EasyJet, Ryanair and Travelodge, increased by 5.3% between September 2007 and September 2008, while the websites of Cruise companies experienced an 8.2% increase in traffic over the same period.

In the same report, they make another interesting and useful observation.  Internet users aged 55+ have continued to flood online and are now the largest group of visitors to travel sector websites:

Internet users aged 55+ now account for 27.3% of UK Internet visitors to Travel websites, making them the largest group of visitors to the industry. The over 45s are the fastest growing demographic for Travel websites, and their tastes are different from younger Internet users. They are more likely to book through agencies than go directly to airline or hotel websites……the section of the online travel industry that most over-indexes with older Internet users is Cruises. Almost 60% of visitors to Cruise websites are aged 55+, with a further 16% coming from the 45-54 age group.

Doesn’t that bring you some hope and joy?  Your online activities need not, must not be regarded as a niche sideline.  Online travel content consumpion is now mainstream to market segments of all ages and all distribution preferences  - for research, direct booking and booking via agents.
2) Despite the disatisfaction consumers have expressed with some travel sites (just last year Forsee reported that the online users were more satisfied with tax than airline websites) it is not all bad news.

JupiterResearch has found that the majority of online travelers believe researching travel online is easier now than ever before, with user-generated content now more influential on the choice of accommodation than brand among online accommodation researchers.

In their US Online Travel Consumer Survey, 2008 (reported in more depth in this Tracking Tourism post) Jupiter found that:

“the 42 percent of online travelers using user-generated content consider the opinions of other travelers to be highly trusted and influential in both accommodation and destination choices”.

For those using user generated content,  reviews/ratings from other travellers were a major influence in the decision making process (after price and location).  36% named user generated content as an influential factor in their decision, compared to 21% citing brand/reputation and 14% citing that old chestnut of family/friend recommendation.

While specific sites, social networks and communities may rise and wane in popularity, the role of reviews and ratings and “real user” validation seems here to stay for the tourism and travel sector.

3) Comscore reported that “mobile search is gaining in both popularity and frequency of use in the U.S. and Western Europe” with the implication that a much heralded shift in behaviour is finally underway, with associated opportunities for those able to capitalise on it.

comScore M:Metrics reported that “in June 2008, 20.8  million U.S. mobile subscribers and 4.5 million European mobile phone subscribers  accessed search during the month, an increase of 68 and 38 percent from June 2007, respectively.  The U.K. had the highest penetration of mobile subscribers using search at 9.5 percent, followed closely by the U.S. at 9.2 percent.”

Their analyst, Alistair Hill clarified the relevance of theis, explaining:

“It is interesting to note that as we see the number of mobile search users increase, the frequency of activity is also growing….. The number of people accessing mobile search at least once a week grew 50 percent in Europe, with France and Spain leading at a rate of 69 and 63 percent, respectively. Meanwhile, the number of U.S. users accessing mobile search has more than doubled as a result of expanded 3G penetration and smartphone adoption, as well as the proliferation of flat-rate data plans.”

As we reported in Tracking Tourism, consumer behaviour is changing and tourism businesses can no longer assume that no one visits their site by phone (or Wii or TV for that matter).  With shifting behaviour comes opportunity for those ready to adapt.

4) PhoCusWright did some much needed myth debunking in The Consumer Travel Trends Tenth Edition. Not only did they show that the number of online travel buyers was not declining, they also showed that all is not lost for online travel agencies.

The assumption that it is only supplier sites that benefits from online travel shoppers, or that people preferring agents are flooding offline, is challenged by their research, which shows that online travel agencies are making a comeback in terms of popularity.

Read more of their myth busting here.

So, its not all doom and gloom.  There is hope.  There is opportunity.

On that note, seasons greetings and a happy new year from Stephen and Vicky at Tracking Tourism.

Post by Vicky

Using Google Insight for tourism and travel research

I recently wrote a post on using Google Trends for tourism and travel insight and this post expands on some of those themes by talking about the Google Insight product.

Before I do so, it might be as well to remind ourselves of the difference between Google Trends and Google Insight.  As I noted in the previous post, “…Google Trends shows data relating to traffic to websites while Google Insight shows data related to search terms.”

So, in a nutshell, Google Insight offers a great way of understanding how people search for particular terms and, more importantly,  the contexts in which they do it.  For a tourism destination, for example, this means that it is possible to judge where your destination lies in comparison to competitor destinations and whether there are opportunities to broaden your market offering.  For a specific tourism or travel business, you can capitalise on the fact that brand names are increasing dominating searches in order to see where you stack up against competitor businesses.

It’s probably best to illustrate this with a concrete example and for this I’m going to look at some tourism businesses in Aviemore, a destination that offers year round outdoor activities close to where I live.  I’m going to concentrate on two businesses - the Aviemore Highland Resort and the Hilton Aviemore. I have selected these two simply because they are both large hotels, they both cater for a similar clientèle and they both undertake marketing expenditure.

Inputting the brand search terms ‘aviemore highland resort’ and ‘hilton aviemore’ brings up results that look like this (or click on the image below for a larger version).  I’ve applied filters to the results so that I receive data based on the relative popularity of the two search terms from people within the UK in the period Jan 07 through to October 08.

You can see from this graph that the two hotels pretty much shadowed each other up until about July this year when the Aviemore Highland Resort started to drift away downwards from the Aviemore Hilton.  Now, there have been periods of divergence before but this recent period strikes me as being longer lasting and deeper than previous splits so, if I were Aviemore Highland Resort, I would now have concrete proof that for some reason, I was no longer making as big an impact when compared to my close rivals. As such, I would either know why (eg marketing budgets might have been changed) or I would be starting to ask serious questions to find out why.

Move from assumptions to proof

But now let’s introduce another search term into the mix to get an idea of whether it’s more a case that the Hilton is performing exceptionally rather than the Highland Resort performing poorly.

In this example, I’ve introduced the term ‘Aviemore Hotels’ as my benchmark term.  Whereas the previous terms are brand terms - and likely used for navigational search by people who are already aware the establishments exist,  ‘Aviemore Hotels’ is a more open search term that requires no knowledge of existing brands in the area.  Therefore it is more of a general benchmark indicator of the broader level of interest in hotels in the area. The result is shown in the graph below (click for a larger version or visit Google Insight here).

One thing that you should notice quickly is that the Hilton seems to trend more closely with the ‘Aviemore Hotels’ line than the Aviemore Highland resort does.  Indeed, the raw data enables us to determine that there is a stronger statistically provable correlation between ‘Aviemore Hilton’ and ‘Aviemore Hotels’ than between ‘Aviemore Highland Resort’ and ‘Aviemore Hotels’. In other words, the Hilton is performing in line with the market and the Highland resort less so.

Incidentally, even if we take the figures for Aviemore Highland Resort in isolation, using the raw data (available if you have a Google Account), we can see that the term ‘aviemore highland resort’ is now performing outside of control limits (defined as standard deviation x 3 - see more here about control limits) as shown in the graph below.

As virtually all web sites have cycles, we should expect to see some changes throughout the year but this suggests that the current change lies outside of what might be expected within these cycles:

So what does this mean?

For the Aviemore Highland Resort it means something may be wrong, beyond the level of a mere seasonal wobble.

My first actions would be to look at spend, bookings and occupancy data to see if there has been a corresponding drop in revenues.  (Afterall we are just talking about search activity here!)

I would look in depth at web traffic and conversions to identify which visitor segments and traffic sources I have lost search activity and potential business from.    I would also look closely at marketing activity and assess whether a drop in advertising spend has lead to this drop in search volume - and whether there is a cost effective way of rectifying that.  Afterall, it is common for people to respond to TV and other forms of offline activity by going online and searching on the brand name.  Is this what is occurring here - and does it even matter to the bottom line?  I’d want to know.

And if I were the Hilton Aviemore?  Well, I be heading off to Google Trends and comparing our overall website traffic for clues.  I’d be looking at my revenue and web analytics data to see if I was benefiting from this displaced search activity - and whether I was converting it into revenue.  And I would bullishly be looking at what I was doing right and be tempted to invest in doing more of the same.

So, Google Insight - used wisely - has the power to act as warning device for your business.  It’s free (and this article has only really touched on a small number of its features), so can you afford to ignore it?

Filed by Stephen (03/12/08)

Google’s business model is simple. It wants you to spend your money wisely on Google business products and, to help you achieve those ends, there are tools to make your spending decisions more informed.

Looked at from another angle, they offer a bunch of tools that you and I can use free of charge.

This post forms part of a series over the next few weeks that will show you how to make the most of tools like this - as well asking some more probing questions about how far they can really help you.

This post originated in a question I asked myself recently, “what exactly does the tool data in Google Trends and Google Insight show and what has this got to do with travel and tourism?”

At a top level, the answer is quite simple. Google Trends shows data relating to traffic to websites while Google Insight shows data related to search terms. However, what they have the potential to give you is considerable and so for this post, I’ll talk just about Google Trends, followed in the future by Google Insights and then finally a post dealing with some more ‘philosophical’ questions these tools have thrown up.

What is Google Trends showing and why is it useful?

OK, let’s start with Google Trends. If you click here, you’ll open up a new window with Google Trend data for visitscotland.com. At this point, you’ll see a graph showing daily unique visitors to the visitscotland.com site over a period of about 2 years. You’ll also see a bunch of data below it. Let’s look at those two elements in turn.

Before I get going though, I would like to stress that I’m using visitscotland.com here as an example only. The point of this is to look at data for your own site (assuming you have sufficient traffic) and to use the techniques contained in this post.

The graph shows a representation of the number of times visitscotland.com has been called up via Google. Note that this is not searches for visitscotland.com in a search box but rather the number of times someone has visited the site and Google has been in a position to capture that data (with some caveats).

Now, this graph can show a lot more but I want to mention the lower half of the screen before getting into that as it is where the data starts to get really interesting.

On the left, you get an indication of where the visitors to visitscotland.com and coming from. In other words, you can see by geography where the warmest prospects are.

In the middle, you can see which other sites were also visited alongside visitscotland.com. In our example, you can see sites ranked that you might expect to see - and depending on your perspective, this might be comforting or unsettling. For example, if you saw visitireland.com as the most visited other site, you would know that there was a real fight at this level to attract visitors who were torn between destinations.

And on the right hand side, you see the search terms that are most often associated with that site. Again, this might be revealing or comforting. For example, if you run a website for a DMO in a whisky distillery town and people find you only by the brandname of your whisky and not under something more generic like ‘whisky tourism scotland’, then this would be a sign that your site isn’t attracting as many visitors as it could.

But the fun really starts because you can start to compare sites.

Let’s demonstrate this by taking our example above and adding a few more sites - visitbritain.com and visitsweden.com. It should now look like this.

Let’s start with the graph. It shows that visitscotland.com attracts more visitors than visitbritain.com or visitsweden.com. It also shows that visitscotland has different peaks and troughs to the other sites at a global level (predominantly the effect of Hogmanay I would guess).

In the bottom half of the screen, you’ll see that you can segment this data by region and by website. You’ll notice that under the ‘ranked by’ tab, you’ll see how each geographic area performs for each of these sites. You’ll notice in our example how Scotland and Sweden are broadly similar in terms of interest in Germany. If, in the upper right of the screen, you use the drop-down box to change ‘all regions’ to ‘Germany’, you should see something like this.

So what’s this saying? It’s saying that, in this instance, people in Germany have show a greater propensity to visit the visitscotland.com site at a different time to the visitsweden site. That might be on account of a campaign by visitscotland in Germany…or it might just show a different ‘natural’ search pattern (and I’ll show you in a coming post how you can go about finding that out). If we assume on this occasion that German’s simply are more interested in visitscotland.com at the periods suggested, wouldn’t it make sense to have the website ready to react to this niche interest at the time? The data suggests that it might be wrong to assume that people think of destinations in a uniform way and that you need to be ready to respond to the customer when they actually come calling, not when you think they ought to be calling.

Conversely, if the spike was the result of an advertising campaign, this gives an indication of how long its effect lasted and how big it was in comparison to the spike caused by possible competitor marketing.

(I’ll hasten to add, I’m not passing judgment on visitscotland.com but just using them as an example - for all I know they might well be doing all this already!)

What I’ve described rather quickly in this post is one, powerful view that the travel and tourism industry can use to get a deeper understanding of how it sits in the online world. But, as is often the case, you need to look at other areas in order to build upper a more mature understanding and so this represents just one part of the picture. In the coming weeks, we’ll develop this theme further with more tips on these free tools.

See post 2 in this series - Warning bells you can’t afford to ignore: courtesy of Google Insights

Further reading:

Competitive Intelligence Analysis: Google Trends for Websites

Forget the political pollsters, Destination DC has its eye on different data

At last week’s eMetrics Summit I had the good fortune to catch up with some really switched on US based destination marketers.

One of those people was Andy Whittaker, Marketing Research Manager for Destination DC. We spoke about the challenges of marketing a place that is on every American’s travel must-do list.

And we philosophised about the incredible challenges of accurately measuring return on investment in destination marketing, when the influencing factors on the travel decision can be so emotional, intangible and thoroughly complicated! (Those guys selling planks of wood and software don’t know how lucky they are!)

He explained “Tourism marketing faces such a huge analysis challenge beyond those faced by consumer goods.  As an industry we’re trying to build awareness, increase loyalty, develop advocates, build visitors - but all these others factors are involved. There are perceptions of fuel costs, emotional responses to uncertainty, competition from destinations all over the world. With limited budget the challenge is to how manage and measure all these things and understand ROI - it’s really difficult.”

A marriage made in heaven

Andy is one of an increasing number of tourism marketers making the shift from pure market research, to a broader role that encompasses web strategy and analysis. With the offical DC Tourism website now coming under his remit, research is blending into web analytics and online data is being harnessed to drive strategy. Yes, it’s hard - but it is also critically important.

Andy is absolutely right to note that combining research and online analysis is a powerful tool in understanding visitor behaviour and improving marketing strategy and effectiveness on the back of that. So often destinations have been led reluctantly online by their own consumers - but standing back while other destinations nail online strategy simply isn’t an option.

“There must be a joined up research approach - the marriage between consumer behaviour and emotional aspects of travel has to be factored in across all channels”

Experienced base web messaging

So earlier this year, the city rebranded itself with a new marketing strategy inviting visitors to create their own “power trips” to Washington DC and emphasising the city’s neighbourhoods beyond the traditional tourist haunts of the Mall and White House. Following extensive brand research, key experiences/persona roles were developed that web visitors can self-identify with to plan their trip and “experience DC.”

Knowledge seekers, urban explorers, families and more all get differently targeted content, based on the pillars identified in the research and the expanded product offering. Andy explains:

“DC has a smaller number of repeat visits compared to competitor cities. Many visitors to DC are getting a surface level experience, just seeing the big attractions. But there is so much more to product, we’d love to attract more repeat business - taking visitors to a new level of experience by exposing them to different layers of the product”.

It seems to me that the experience customisation on the site is still in its early days - there is so much more potential. I would have liked to be able to create my personal experience then easily transfer it to my Blackberry or iPod and hit the streets. But the approach as it stands now is successfully delivering on these objectives of offering a depth and breadth of potential experience. They seem to be on the right track of a smart world city destination, rather than an urban theme park experience.

Innovating for the international market

And product innovation is a necessity. International visitors are lucrative business. They make up only about 8 percent of visitors to DC, but they account for more than 25% of tourism spending (contributing more than $1,000 per visitor on average, compared with less than $300 per domestic visitor).

Washington DC faces increasing competition worldwide - their UK and Canada markets, for example, are being heavily targeted by many other destinations worldwide. The India, China and French markets are growing - but Destination DC realise they need to understand the messages potential visitors are getting from other destinations globally.

Smartly and despite limited resources (Destination DC invests $1million a year in paid marketing/advertising - a small fraction of New York, Las Vegas or Orlando’s investment), they are focussing efforts on understand differing international market trends relating broadband, e-readiness, direct online purchase trends etc.

Traditionally international markets have been marketed to through trade channels - but this is changing too. Destination DC realises it needs to go direct to consumers through online marketing activities, because this is how travellers now plan and to some varying extents purchase their trips.

For Andy, the eMetrics Summit seems to have been something of an epiphany (of the data variety of course!)

“I came into this conference to better understand how to better utilise the basic web analytics data like pages views etc. But what I have seen is the bigger and more powerful picture. The opportunity to understand voice of customer online, to measure satisfaction and tie it all together in terms of how we are meeting specific strategic goals.”

Be very afraid New York, Las Vegas, Orlando and London! Destination DC have seen what they can do with their data and they’re not afraid to exploit it for unfair advantage.

Let us know how it goes Andy!

“Tourism is everyone’s business”

From Scotland to South Africa, Beijing to the Cook Islands, it’s a much quoted maxim that “tourism is everyone’s business”.  Not surprisingly, it passes particularly from the lips of those national and regional marketers charged with putting a destination’s best faced forward to the world.  They are only too aware of the severe damage that gaps between the promise and delivery of experience can cause.

With all the multiple touchpoints that impact on a visitors end-to-end experience, one bad apple has the power to sour the visitor experience. Sometimes to the extent that the good businesses cannot fully redeem it.

As a result, the investment to win, satisfy and re-attract a customer at national, regional and individual business level is undermined.

Sound like I’m exaggerating?  Here at Highland Business Research we conduct direct visitor satisfaction research across countries, destinations and individual businesses.  We seek out visitors for face to face or internet research, plus they seek us out to share their experiences through our systematic customer experience measurement programmes.

Here are some first hand examples of the bad apple effect in actions.

“I just had to get this off my chest”…

I recently received a phone call from a visitor who’d just experienced the worst meal of their life.  The hotel in question was not our client and had provided no means for the visitor to give feedback.  But so incensed and upset was this individual that they went to the trouble of using a feedback postcard from a completely different business to track down our number and call.

They felt that had wasted money they could ill afford, a special occasion had been spoilt and their impression of the overall destination was unquestionably tarnished.  So they went to the effort to tell someone “in tourism” about it, in the hope someone cared.  Another person would have been on Tripadvisor, blogging or writing to the local newspaper.

Our client, who has invested in their business and in analysing and acting on customer feedback, not only lost trade to the bad apple but in effect subsidised the means for the bad apple’s customer to complain.

In another incident, a visitor almost shook with rage during a recent face to face interview as they recalled how a few days earlier they had been subjected to particularly patronising and abusive “service” in a shop where they were browsing for high end gifts.  They had decided to keep their money and weren’t planning any more shopping.

Because we spend a lot of time asking visitors about their experience and represent a disinterested party they can be frank with, we not only hear about some appalling examples of bad apples in action - we also get to see just how strong the emotional reaction is to the negative experiences.

The ripple-out effect is wide.

When conducting research for destination A it is common to be told about an emotive incident that occurred in destination B - completely beyond the scope of influence of those undertaking the research, but one and the same in the visitors mind.

Bad experiences stick and people want to get them off their chest by telling others about them.  And they now have the tools to tell a bigger audience than ever.  The ripple out is a problem because it takes more than an equal amount of good experiences to offset the damage from a very negative one.  Additionally the negative experience anchors satisfaction low, so that the visitor is also likely to rate the other tourism businesses that they encounter lower than they would otherwise have done.

Wired’s take on the anchoring effect: “If a customer watches three movies in a row that merit four stars — say, the Star Wars trilogy — and then sees one that’s a bit better — say, Blade Runner — they’ll likely give the last movie five stars. But if they started the week with one-star stinkers like the Star Wars prequels, Blade Runner might get only a 4 or even a 3.”

So what to do about the bad apples?

There’s no deny that tourists and therefore tourism and travel businesses are facing an economic struggle.  With vacation time and income tight, the sting of a very bad experience with the bad apple is potentially even more potent. And with competition fierce, a good business or destination that is making effort and investment is justified in being frustrated when future business is lost thanks to a bad apple.

So assuming that a Beijing Olympics approach to obstacles is not taken, what does a destination or a group of businesses do about the bad apple that is impacting on the experience of their own visitors?

I must be honest and say I have no grand plan - only some loose ideas below.  I would be very interested to hear your thoughts and experiences.  Here are my views on some possible options:

• Just let market forces take their toll. If they’re that bad they’ll go out of business.  The trouble with this one is that in current economic circumstances they’ll probably go out of business slower than a far better business that has debt from investment in its product and expensive well trained staff.  I’m not sure “do nothing” can be enough for a destination that is fighting hard to stay business.

• Provide a band aid, moral support and try to outshine the negative. The good business tries to offset the negative impact, by virtue of its qualities, winning the visitor round in the process.  The trouble is, the negative has already had an impact.  An anchoring effect kicks in, meaning that the rating the good business achieves may still be lower - despite them doing everything right - than it would have been after a series of good experiences by the customer.

• Name and shame - let the customers do the talking? Tourism businesses have always listened to their customers’ feedback on the associated experiences in their visit that they did or didn’t enjoy and have used these to formulate future recommendations for customers.  The popularity of online travel ratings and user generated content means it possible for you to have a wider than ever view of who the bad apples in your market are.  Visitors are talking and you can listen.  Whether you then encourage your customers to avoid the bad apples like the plague, or are tasked with trying to bring them up to standard depends on your job description!

• Apply the carrot of training/rewards and the stick of policy at a national or regional level. Not an option that tends to have teeth in free market Western democracies, but still wrestled with the world over.  But with so much of the tourism sector operating in a grey zone outside of official quality assurance programs, or impacted by businesses such as retail that may not even regard themselves as “in tourism” - taking this approach as a standalone seems doomed outside of planned economies.

• Lead by example to drive sector, community or destination level quality control activities.  Ah, a tough one.  Movements like Scotland’s Pride and Passion have taken this approach, with the private sector trying to lead by best practice example.  However, the concern is that they are preaching to the converted.  Are they ever successful in influencing the indifferent, ill-willed and the incompetent that make up the bad apples? (This is a genuine question - please do tell me if you know!)

If I had to pick one, personally it would be name and shame by letting the customers do the talking - and really utilise what you are hearing for competitive advantage.  As my recent distressed caller said “there are clearly so much nicer places about, I want other people to be able to find them instead of places that don’t give a damn”.

I’d love to hear if you know of different appraches to this issue that have worked.

Learn to love qualitative research and discover the three greatest open questions you could be asking

Businesses and organisations like surveys. Surveys are easy enough to produce (but not so easy to produce well). They give you answers to things that interest you and they give you measures that are useful when ticking your own boxes.

Ordinary people, on the other hand, seem at best to tolerate surveys and show a remarkable resilience when faced with daft questions. You know the ones - they’re a bit like, “On a scale of 1-5 tell me how satisfied you are with the Sleepytown’s CrimeSukz food crime prevention initiative and its effect on you.”

Don’t get me wrong, quantitative surveys have their place and I’ll discuss where this is in a minute. But they are rarely a conversation and in my experience, if you want to rich data from a customer’s perspective, you need to get your hands dirty and get into qualitative research.

Qualitative and Quantitative Research - a quick reminder.

For those of you a little rusty on this, the next few paragraphs are a quick primer for you. Quantitative research is about numbers. ‘9 out of 10 cats prefer a warm fire to the snow’ is an example of quantitative research. Qualitative research is about attitudes, beliefs, views and motivations - the kind of things that are more difficult to reduce to numbers. ‘I’ll vote for Mayor Sandburg but I think he comes across as shifty’ is an example of qualitative insight.

Obviously both types of research compliment each other but it seems to me that people are generally more distrusting of qual than quant.

Qual tells you what you weren’t looking for. Personally, I think this is a good thing.

If I use a quantitative survey structure that asks “What was the biggest problem - the sidewalks, the shops or the train station” I will get an answer where the respondent has weighed up the relative standing of only these three options and given me an answer accordingly. However, if I ask an open question and get answers that say, “I couldn’t see anything”, “The view was terrible” and “My child missed everything because of tall people in front of her” - then I am a) revealing a previously unknown issue and b) getting an idea of its importance because it is the thing that occurs spontaneously in the conversation. In this example, we have moved from the producer’s perspective through to the customer’s perspective.

So what’s the problem with qual?

• It’s difficult to understand

There’s no way round it - understanding qual data can be difficult. For example, you have lots of people saying lots of things in lots of different ways at the same time and simultaneously often meaning something other than what they’re uttering (see my previous post for details!) My view is that putting in some effort is worth while as the outcomes are invaluable and I speak of some solution later in this post about presentation and analysis.

• What about sample sizes?

The issue of sample sizes is a vexing one. In some forms of research it is vital. If you are bringing a medicine to market, for example, a sample size that enables you to know that it will make 0.05% of its users violently unwell is a justified investment. If you are a political party, knowing that you are 3 points ahead in election week is also important. But a) large samples cost large money and b) you don’t need them all the time anyway.

Two focus groups of 8 people each will generally give me a deeper insight into people’s motivations about something than a survey of 500 people (the survey of 500 on the other hand will help me to identify demographic differences as well as enabling me to determine, for example, clusters, correlations and other exotic items).

Solutions and Presentation

• Don’t be afraid of open ended questions

If you are doing a quantitative survey, there’s nothing to stop you including open questions and coding the responses. It’s not going to be as quick as totting up a ‘which do you prefer?’ kind of survey but, if you sift through the open responses, you will generally find that you can reduce them down into a manageable number of categories. The example above with people saying things like “I couldn’t see anything” and “The view was terrible” could be coded in this fashion as ‘viewing’ or possibly ‘crowding’ issues (depending on a probably known context).

This can then be condensed and treated as quantitative data but with the advantage that you have not decided the paramenters before starting. The following (fictitious) table of customer complaints gives an example of this and used the same data as the later example further down this post. The message in this instance from open field data is that a) there are three distinct areas of improvement needed and b) an indication of the priority they assume for the customer.

• Good presentation is important too

The kind of table above is good for management and bean-counters - but what about for people who either don’t have the time to read that stuff of are sceptical of the interpretation you are putting on it?

Using the same data used for the table above, I’ve transferred the customer comments (with light editing for sense) into a visual word cloud. This allows the same information to be gathered at a glance.

What should you be asking?

So, I’m a fan of asking open ended questions and then playing with the results for deeper insight. But what are good questions to ask? Well, obviously, the more open ended the better. But I’m on the hunt now to work out what the standard ‘killer’ questions could be for the tourism and travel industry.

This is ground that we’ve covered in this blog before for the online world and the issue has also been covered in depth by Jim Sterne of the WAA as well as Avinash Kaushik (see Avinash’s The Three Greatest Survey Questions Ever. In terms of the online experience the questions are as follows:

• What is the purpose of your visit to our website today?
• Were you able to complete your task today?
• If you were not able to complete your task today, why not?

There are two things to note here. Firstly, it is a mixture of open and closed questions. Secondly, they are questions that are, to my mind, explicitly transactional. In other words, one visits a website usually for a clear purpose and you know whether you mnaged to do that or not. The purpose of a tourism experience could also be reduced to an almost transactional simplicity but I am not sure that people really think like that in this context so, if we are to use this kind of structure in offline travel and tourism, then we need to adapt it a little.

Before I dive into what I think might be workable alternatives for the tourism and travel industry, I’ll explain why I like this ‘back to basic’s’ approach. It’s because the answers tell you which issues matter. It gives you an insight into your customer’s use of language. It’s specific without being proscriptive. It can be used for marketing as well as feedback.

OK, it might not tell you that they were only 3.4% satisfied by the product positioning statement but, frankly, who cares when you can know that they are all badmouthing your business because the aircon kept them awake all night and the sheets smell of smoke?

So, here’s my suggestion for the three greatest tourism survey questions ever.

• Why did you stay/visit here?
• Were you satisfied?
• If not, why not?

Actually, ‘the three greatest tourism survey questions ever‘ sounds definitive when it’s not -this is a blog and so let’s see if we really can refine the greatest three travel and tourism survey questions ever together.

So…we’re all open minded, liberal in outlook and, above all, lacking in prejudice aren’t we? Well, as with many things, the answer isn’t perhaps what you would like it to be and is more complex than it first appears.

The bottom line, in my experience, is that people are prejudiced and you need to be aware of this when marketing your destination.

When I say prejudiced, it should be understood that I don’t mean bigoted or chauvinistic (although there is a part of the market that is). What I mean instead is that we all have preconceived ideas about destinations that mean we unconsciously use these prejudices as filters in our decision processes.

But how do you discover what people’s prejudices are and, more importantly, how can you change them?

Well, the answer is, in the first place, to really get under your potential customer’s skin. And I don’t just mean doing a quick survey but really getting into their way of thinking because a glibly expressed prejudice (”I don’t fancy a holiday in Germany” for example) can actually be just the visible expression of a complex set of ideas.

We’ve just finished an evaluation of a UK wide marketing campaign for an overseas destination and its reminded us of how powerful qualitative research is at revealing the kinds of small preconceptions we all carry that act as barriers in our decision to choose one destination over another.

I’m not going to name the destination and I’m not going to discuss specific results - the clients paid me to deliver the work to them and not broadcast it openly on the internet, so you’ll have to bear with me on that one! But I can use heavily disguised fictitious examples of the kinds of the insights we received to illustrate the points.

Before I do, I do appreciate that a lot of people remain wary of qualitative research – the term ‘focus group’ especially seems to provoke some pretty sceptical reactions. It seems to have connotations of flimsy insight, people telling you want you want to hear, management fads and slightly distasteful associations with unprincipled political processes.

Handled badly this is indeed what you will get for your money. Handled well, however, and you start to gain a richness beyond bare numbers.

So, lets look at some of those disguised examples:

“I like the marketing campaign image of the jet skiing – I just thought the area was rainy and grey but the blue sea makes me realise that it could be a warm beach destination as well!” 

Note that the original intention of the image being discussed in the example above was to convey a more active and sporty image for the destination, not one that was suggestive of the climate. However, it revealed that other people in the target group had the idea that the destination was cold and grey – this was their prejudiced view of the destination.

Now, before we go further, perhaps a little more about prejudice. As I suggested above, prejudice is one very human way of making decisions quickly. I’m not saying that the decision is rational (a suspicion of someone based on skin colour is clearly irrational in a modern person for example) but just because it is an ‘unthinking’ response, it doesn’t mean that it is an irrelevant response. Lets go back to the example above to illustrate that point further.

People who go on holiday with young children know that climate plays a much more important role in the experience than it might for a childless couple. If a destination is too hot, your children need to be protected. If it’s too wet, they need to be entertained. And you can’t just go to the pub/museum/cinema/shops with them – they need appropriate attention for young children. So, reassurance that a destination has a good climate is ticking an unconscious box in the minds of parents, despite the fact that the message contained in the original image was aimed at someone different (hedonistic 20-30 year olds for example).

In our example, the parents’ prejudice expressed as ‘cold and grey’ was a mask for a more complex and rational set of deliberations they employ when making a decision about the right destination to take children to.

“It’s great to experience local culture but a good hotel offers a sense of real sanctuary from all that – there comes a point when you want to shut the door and relax and know you will be safe and unhassled”

Now, a statement expressed in terms like this is probably not one that would not be made in every part of the world, although a variation of it might well be universal. The underlying desire is for security and a sense of ‘circling the wagons’ in order to catch your breath at the end of the day. But would you necessarily express it like that if you were holidaying , say, in North West Scotland? My guess is that it more likely to be something said by someone who expects to experience a vibrant but slightly chaotic culture destination. There are positives in this person’s statement (they think they can interact safely with the local culture) but it should also be recognised that they think there is a slightly wilder element and so need reassurance that they can (literally) shut the door on all that.

So what?

The examples above both demonstrate that certain market segments have preconceived ideas about an area that mean that they quickly discard some options without serious consideration. Understanding the reasons behind these notions means that you can start to answer them head on. In the examples I used above, the person speaking needed reassurance that their discomfort and bother would be minimised, and even though they received this tangentially, the destination’s marketing did tackle their concerns.

The point is, however, that you won’t know what really makes your customer’s tick unless you listen to them. And it’s not just about listening – it’s also about hearing what isn’t being said and what is being said, but in a disguised way.

Quick! Call the police!

There’s probably another blog post altogether in this observation but I’ve often been struck at how the techniques used by the police in interviews and techniques used in a focus group are similar. I’ll stress that I’ve never been interviewed myself by the police but policemen I know have described their interview methods to me and there are a lot of similarities – you’re both interested in peeling away the outer layer of stories to see if there is anything more underneath.

So, if any of you know policemen or women, ask them about ‘softly softly’ interview techniques – they might just come in useful when listening to your customers!

Some of biggest travel and tourism questions and how research can best address them

It is my humble opinion that lots of research effort and money is wasted on tackling the wrong questions. Questions that don’t stand up to the so what? test and so do not ultimately help make money, save money or improve customer experience.

I reckon there are some “big questions” at the heart of businesses and organisations in the travel and tourism sector. And while these big questions are mind-blowingly scary, because they can’t be glibly answered with a quick survey or a few days work, I think it is essential to keep them in mind for every single research and analytics activity you undertake. This is because they form the big picture - the context, the so what? - that all smaller activity must be calibrated towards.

Without reference back to the big questions, ad hoc research and analysis activity can easily lose its way or fail to be translated into any form of meaningful action. It becomes focused on the interesting or on the production of information - not on tactics and strategy.

So here’s my big three. (You may disagree and it’d be good to explore your thoughts and suggestions!)

1. How do we attract and convert customers in the face of intense global competition?

2. What must we [and all our delivery partners in the end to end process] do to ensure customers will come back/recommend to others?

3. How do we deliver a optimum customer experience from a profitable, sustainable business base?

You may have noticed I’ve covered the business, the customer, the market, but not explicitly product. Partly, this is because I see product as being closely bound up in question 1 and 3. Mostly, though, I think that in a Travel 2.0 environment, the toughest questions revolve around the customer’s experience and demand.

“The 20th century was about sorting out supply…The 21st is going to be about sorting out demand.” The Internet makes everything available, but mere availability is meaningless if the products remain unknown to potential buyers. Wired Magazine

At this point, you may be exclaiming “Enough with the deep stuff Vicky, I just want to know if my customer had a good time. I’m not trying to solve universal questions right now” To which I must irritate you further. Because as I see it, the “how was your experience” type question is asked in order to tactically address question 2 and 3. If it is being asked in isolation, all small picture and no big picture, what do you do with the answers? Benchmarking and nice graphs don’t improve customer experience or the bottom line. It’s the actions - however small - that make the difference.

So, where does research fit in to tackling these questions?

Well, given I’m feeling philosophical, I would suggest it takes a shift in mindset in order to enable these big questions to be properly tackled by research. A shift away from the idea that research is somehow something you do a bit of once in a while when you need it. A shift towards a culture of business intelligence and analytics that works with all the data it has (even if it is in a show box) in order to tackle and act on the big questions.

Allan Leighton, Chairman of the Royal Mail declared at the recent Market Research Society conference:

“I believe every organisation should have radar - to listen to your people, listen to your customers all the time. It shouldn’t be called research it should be called radar. You cannot be selective when you have it. You have to have it all the time.”

I quote it because I couldn’t agree more. And I don’t think that only global corporations and national destinations that have a hope of attaining this - I do genuinely believe that a very small business with the right mindset can also be intelligence driven.

Making radar work for you

So what does the shift from research to radar involve?

1) Always on

You can’t just do a bit of radar when you think you might need it. Radar is always on, always monitoring the information stream in anticipation of the unexpected. In research terms, that means listening to customers, staff and other data on an ongoing, not an ad-hoc basis.

2) All around

Radar takes a 360 degree view of information, it doesn’t focus on one source at the cost of all others. Switchboard activity, website activity, conversations with customers, regular staff surveys, news reports, transactional information, emails are all data sources. Listen in, by keeping on top of it and finding a standard way of recording and reporting on key information.

3) Alarms and flashing lights

Radar can only alert. Make those alerts easy to spot, as opposed to hidden deep in 100 page reports. Make the bells ring loud and the lights flash bright through the way reporting information is presented and distributed. If the boss wants a 50 word summary in a text message, that’s great. Because the point of alarms and flashing lights is for the leadership to see the problem and act.

4) Is it a bird? Is it a plane?

But is there even a problem? What is going on? Why? Often the picture isn’t really clear and your radar triggers more questions than answers. But staff on the ground know more than is often allowed for - talking to them can give insight to what is going on. You may also need to know more about what customers think and what their reasons are for this.Depending on the size of your organisation, this may be the point that you need outside expertise - or at least to make some bright internal spark available to ask great questions and crunch the answers.

5) Looks forward more often than you look back

Ait Traffic Control doesn’t use radar to see how safely planes landed yesterday, they use it to make critical, tactical decisions in the present and immediate future. The focus more on what is going on now and what might be in the way - not solely on what happened in the past.

Beware, brains in action

So, how do we get business, retain business, oh and make some money/fulfil our stated mission too?

I think these “big questions” are at the heart of businesses and organisations in the travel and tourism sector. And the point is, they can’t be answered by a quick bit of research or a new fangled tool. Instead, every piece of data/research/analysis that flows through the organisation should serve towards these critical questions.

I won’t pretend it is easy - but it is being done. And it’s being done by businesses in this sector, giving them distinct competitive advantage over those who’re wasting their time and effort tackling the wrong questions.

So, a final question to you - am I on the right track, or hopelessly deluded?

Local destination management and marketing groups face a challenge.

They need to make a strong demonstration of their value and impact in order to attract and retain the participation of local tourism businesses. Yet their outputs are not necessarily easily expressed in terms of direct sales.

National tourism data is rarely expressed in a way that reflects the specific geographic area of interest to the local organisation. Nor do they necessarily get to see the member businesses sales data that arise from their efforts - making straight return on investment calculations challenging.

So, how can local destination marketing and management groups demonstrate value?

Defining success on your terms

Until you really define success, you can’t measure it. But again, at a local destination level, it isn’t always easy.

For the individual tourism business, success is ultimately defined by revenue. No profits, then eventually no business. Occupancy rates, spend per head and customer satisfaction are all useful performance indicators - but cash is king.

At a national level, tourism success is judged by criteria closely allied to government goals and interests. These include economic indicators (such as tourism share of employment and gdp, or growth in revenues). They may also be linked to inward investment, international image and brand perception.

But for local destinations and their marketing groups - from tourism groups, chambers of commerce, to formal destination management organisations - simply defining success can be a lot harder.

This is because the tourism marketing goals of local destinations are not always simply a case of increasing overall visitor numbers. But pinning down that definition of success is critical, because it is what all goals, strategies and demonstration of results ultimately hinge on.

So what form might success take for a local destination?

• increasing or widening the distribution of visitor spend
• shifting the brand position, for example to a more luxury destination
• growing spend, tax revenues or number of bednights per visit
• boosting local employment off peak season
• increasing online visibility of the destination
• regenerating economic or environmental decay
• building a sustainable community tourism model
• increasing visitor participation in events & activities
• improving the competitiveness or attractiveness of the destination, compared to others

There may even be a degree of social enterprise, redistributing the benefits of economies of scale to community businesses.

So, with so many possible options for what success might constitute to a local destination, defining precisely what the goals and objectives are is the first major step towards demonstrating how successfully they’re being achieved.

From there it becomes easier to match those goals to possible performance indicators.

Know where you are now, as well as where you want to be

It is only possible to demonstrate the impact of your efforts if have some kind of starting point to measure from. Ideally that means a proper destination audit, including an honest assessment of the current performance and resources. When doing this kind of research, we tend to look both at the supply side resources, quality, capacity and distribution. We also look at the demand side by speaking to visitors about quality of their experience and where possible examining comment data.

Its also important to define a timed framework of where you want to get next - after all, sometimes success for a destination in simply stopping further decline.

Once you know where you are and the time frame for action, it makes it easier to look at your data sources and pick your benchmarks.

What are your data sources?

Perhaps more than any type of tourism organisation, local groups suffer from lack of ownership of the critical revenue and satisfaction data they need to measure their success. Therefore as I see it, at least two options are open.

1) Do a really good job of convincing local business to share their data with you. This could be by offering more value and analysis from that information than it would have in isolation (ie the whole visit view, rather than a view of one link in the chain).

2) Pick benchmarks that you can control and relate to the data you do have access to. This could involve doing your own periodic surveys, using local tax data, using web analytics data, or as I have described previously - working with something as practical as sewage data!

These are not exclusive, of course - you can do both. But there is no need to let the fact you can’t get sales data be a barrier to measuring your success.

Selecting your measurement criteria

Ultimately, you won’t know if you’re successful or not if you don’t measure consistently.

A handful of key performance indicators, ratios that are benchmarked over time, will reveal your progress.

And these don’t need to be hugely complex. For example, a key performance indicator related to increasing visitor participation in events & activities could be the ratio of non local postcodes amongst total event attendees.

Keeping measures/KPIs strongly aligned to the goals/stated success outcomes also helps to really tighten the focus on what information is going to be needed from others.

If the tourism group then needs to ask member businesses for specific information to help that measurement, or they need to conduct research directly, they will be able to restrict their efforts to just looking at those factors that matter (as opposed to thankless task of trying to measure everything!)

So, to conclude, the key to getting to grips with local tourism success is first to really define what a successful outcome is.

From there, gather relevant supporting evidence to assess whether the goal has been achieved (by gathering your own data or asking local businesses to provide only what is really required). Keep it simple by only measuring and reporting on what really matters to you. Finally, communicate your success back to the area, backed up with tangible data!

How can you convey the real feel of a place online?

Over the last few weeks of conducting web research with real site visitors, I have been reminded that while facts are important online, decisions are made with the heart.

While exploring a series of sites, the users consistently told me “it doesn’t give me a feel of the place”, “its better on facts than feelings”, “I don’t really connect with it emotionally” and “I want to be able to imagine what it is really like”.

Anticipation, imagination, emotional connections - isn’t that a pretty tall order for a humble website?

Not really - after all, we’re talking travel, not concrete, enemas or animal feed.

The Internet is full of travellers already sharing their experiences and feelings about tourism destinations and businesses. Tapping into that (or simply learning from their vocabulary and examples) will help you ensure visitors can’t help but feel their hearts flutter!

So how can you inject a bit of soul and feeling into you site? Here’s a bit of insight I can share from my recent research - and I again thank the participants for their forthrightness!

1. “Show me, don’t make me read”

100 useful words and one useless yellow button and what do you think gets all the attention? People will read when they’re ready, but it is only one way to make an impression and a fairly considered one at that. Irrational excitement and anticipation comes from engaging several senses and igniting imagination. The users I was working with said “show me,” and who could argue that this display of the Northern Lights is better watched than read.

And the same could apply to “let me listen.” (Check out this evocative audio of waves breaking on Pebble Beach, Victoria, Canada and tell me you aren’t moved just a little?)

Text isn’t the only option online and potential travellers want their senses tickled!

2. Using images and multimedia

“TVtrip films your hotel (for free!) and your hotel is then featured on TVtrip.com… You also receive a copy of the video to use on your own website, again for free.”

So tickling senses is all very well, but video, audio, high quality images - that all sounds jolly expensive. And it is true that should you wish, you can quickly blow your annual budget by making stuff look really, really pretty.

But it doesn’t just have to be your content that you use. Before you call the police, I’m not suggesting you steal anything or use any content without permission. Because the fact is your visitors, people in you area, friends and strangers are taking all photos, making videos and uploading them to the web. Flickr and Youtube are some of the most visited properties on the web. You can choose to link to that content, or you can go further and either ask if you can access the content for your site, or invite people to submit it to you directly.

There are also companies like TVTrip who will produce cheap or free multimedia content for you. They make their money on the usual affiliate model, happy in the knowledge that multimedia content has a great uplift on hotel bookings. You can (but of course) see their explanatory video here.

3. Testimony - don’t just take my word for it

I’ve already written about why you shouldn’t be afraid of Tripadvisor and should be brave enough to share your user reviews direct with potential customers. But if that is simply a leap too far, you can still tap into the power of realistic, authentic testimonials.

The wise and delightful Sean de Souza has a great article called Is There Too Much Sugar In Your Testimonials? There’s a danger of on-site testimonials seeming phoney, but a sprinkle of realism and some photos for a personal touch make them far more credible. But nothing beats unbiased, off-site comments - and you can always link direct when you earn these. ExtramileScotland is a great example.

4. Ground the place in relative terms

“So where is it then?… Where is it near?… Where in relation to London?” Pretty obvious questions when you think about it, but you can really convey a sense of place when you ground yourself relative to a better known or more evocative destinations. Not only does this improve your search engine rankings, it allows potential visitors to make a mental map of where you fit in to the wider context of their travels.

5. Cater for multiple perspectives

People like pictures of people like them.

Hence me including this entirely gratuitous photo of travel bloggers.

But what is familiar, engaging and reassuring to some (like white water rafting or travel blogging) is dreary or downright off putting to others.

To build emotional connections for different segments in your target market, it is important to carefully choose a range of people focussed images that broadly reflects these different groups, their interests and tastes. You can probably narrow your key market segments down to between 4 and 7 groups, so there’s no need to go picture crazy.

Are your senses tickled yet?

Hopefully I’ve conveyed to you that web visitors are open to sensory stimulation on multiple levels. And when they find it, the results are typically greater emotional engagement and increased likelihood to buy.

Sadly I failed in my quest to tingle all your main senses, so if anyone knows of a smelly or edible website, please let me know!