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

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!

I’ve noticed that when you mention the name Tripadvisor to accommodation providers, the vast majority give an involuntary shudder.

Due to some genuine bad experiences, there seems to be a widespread assumption amongst businesses that Tripadvisor reviews accentuate the negative.

Yet I am an avowed Tripadvisor user and I have only ever given two negative reviews. I have chosen accommodation I wouldn’t have otherwise heard of based on the glowing reviews of other users - and I’m sure I am not alone.

So is there more than my anecdotal experience to demonstrate that the user reviews on Tripadvisor are not bad news for good businesses? It just so happens there is!

I’ve done some quick research for this post by looking at the user ratings of 108 local Inverness area accommodation providers reviewed on Tripadvisor. Where available, I cross-referenced these user-generated scores with the Scottish industry quality assurance/star ratings for those same businesses, using other data sources.

What I found is that Tripadvisor reviewers are not only far more generous than you might think (the most common score is four out of five) – but fewer than 20% of accommodation providers are rated lower by visitors than their quality assurance rating would suggest.

Not only that, but it’s the little guys that fare best of all.

I sliced and diced the user ratings by accommodation type and discovered that it is actually the B&Bs of Inverness who score highest on Tripadvisor.

The trends are far more positive than negative

More than 50% of accommodation businesses I looked at are rated 4 out of five or above by Tripadvisor reviewers. The average (mean) is a little lower at 3.8, pulled down by the handful of very poor performers.

More than 50% of businesses also receive a rating from user reviewers that is higher than their Quality Assurance rating. Yes, the QA rating is looking at different and very specific factors, but it is a sign of a very positive visitor experience when a two star establishment can get a 4.0 Tripadvisor rating because it delivers that 2 star experience extremely well indeed.

Whether it is a reflection on the wisdom of crowds or wisdom of the QA assessors, fewer than 20% of accommodation providers are rated lower by visitors than their star rating would suggest. So who are those establishments with Tripadvisor ratings lower than their QA scores? They were almost exclusively 5 or 4 star B&Bs. Their visitors rated them either 0.5 points or 1 point lower than the QA rating and while I haven’t done a full text analysis of comments, I suspect that poor warmth of welcome/friendliness may have been a factor in some of these cases.

So to conclude - don’t bury your head in the sand. If you have a good product and good people, have faith that the majority of Tripadvisor reviewers are not out to get you. In fact, they’re likely to be pretty generous!

Let me know if you’d like to see more of this data and I’ll do a follow up post.

Post Summary

Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail, surmises that ‘free’ services will be a driver for business in the years to come. This post considers ways in which this could apply to the travel and hospitality market.

Chris Anderson, the man responsible for the idea of the Long Tail, has been at it again.

This month’s edition of Wired features an article called Free! Why $0.00 is the Future of Business which is about how items and services for which we are traditionally charged become free while as the potential to make money lies in ancillary services.

So, for example, you make your money not on the cost of a printer but instead the lifetime value of ink supplies. Or a newspaper becomes free on the internet as the increased audience enables it to earn enough from the increased advertising opportunities to cover the loss of income from people paying for a paper copy of the paper.

I have some issues with the articles conclusions but it is an interesting concept and one that is already being used within the travel and tourism industry.

Two examples:

1) Ryanair makes its money through food, drink, premium reservations - not just through seat sales. Michael O’Leary is on record as wanting to offer seats for free -and you just know he’s not doing this out of charity but because he knows there’s a workable business plan behind it.

2) Free Wifi Access in Hotels - it helps to differentiate one hotel from another but, presumably, could also be used to encourage cross subsidization of the service in other areas. For example, making WiFi access free could encourage guests to stay in their rooms and order more from the on-site catering.

Free Hotels?

When you come to think of it, there is little difference between a hotel room and a seat on a plane. Both are perishable commodities - once the fight takes off or the night is passed, there is no getting that unsold stock back. So, could we see the introduction at some point of the free hotel room?

Actually, I don’t see why not but I think it would need significant economies of scale to work - or a degree of monopoly provision to help things along. What I mean by ‘monopoly provision’ is this: if you are flying, you have little choice but to purchase water (for example) from the cabin crew if you have not planned ahead. You can’t pop out mid flight to get a cheaper bottle of water from the nearest newsagent or drugstore.

In other words, if there isn’t too much choice (as opposed to no choice) around, then there is a greater chance that you will be able to make money on incidentals. All airlines also have the appearance of a temporary monopoly for the duration of its flights in the form of a captive audience on the flights which means that they can sell advertising in the form of inflight magazines.

There’s no such thing as a free room.

So my thoughts are that this model might work in other areas of the tourism industry - but the trick is to identify those areas where choice is more restricted. Off the top of my head, I would suggest some remote rural locations might work under this model - there have been times when I have probably spent more on catering than accommodation in B and Bs in the North of Scotland because there simply isn’t any other alternatives.

Using my example, however, does raise the obvious question: “If I can charge £25 per person per night lodging and they spend £30 per person per night on meals, why should I make the room free and cut my income by £25 per night?” Well, the answer to that I guess is good old ‘price elasticity of demand’ - if the offer attracts enough new guests then it pays for the £25 per night loss.

Competing on Price and Quality?

So, in conclusion, I have reservations about this but I think that some brave tourism provider could well try this and if their business model is right then they will succeed. I have always been taught that to fight on price alone is a mug’s game unless you have deep pockets - however if you are able to fight on price and quality (in the form of meals, for example, that people will pay more for) then you perhaps have the makings of a winning combination.

Any thoughts?

Maybe it was the unexpected snow. Or perhaps the transport strike. But when Philip Wolf, CEO of travel industry analyst firm PhoCusWright, addressed the bloggers summit at ITB Berlin yesterday, he was putting his neck on the line and predicting big storms on the travel industry horizon.

A perfect storm in fact.

Not the kind featuring a wet George Clooney in a fishingboat, but a convergence of three separate stands of online behaviour and technology that look set to impact travel purchase both dramatically and profoundly.

Philip is predicting a perfect storm of search, shop and buy.

But what does he mean?

“A perfect storm is born when several events occur simultaneously which if occurring separately would be far less powerful. What we’ve identified is that the advance of search technology, online shopping and buying will lead to a whole technological revolution.”

What are these converging fronts? Search technology now means that people can find needle in haystack online. Search and user generated content are used together (and also in conjunction with other media) - people have access to so much information they can make the right travel choice accordingly.

Additionally, in a longtail environment of unlimited travel choice online, it can also now be economically viable to be the niche seller of a needle in haystack. From an Online Travel Agent, to a single small business operator - technology allows you to connect your niche, personalised product with its dream purchaser on the otherside of the world.

Purchasing habits are evolving too. While the “research online, purchase offline” is still an important search behaviour, online travel purchase has become mainstream to the extent that it no longer just represents flight and hotel sales, but also everything including costly luxury packages. More and more people contain to come online and to buy travel online - the US has already surpassed the 50% mark for online bookings and in emerging markets like India, travel is the “killer” e-commerce application.

Social media have also shifted power to the consumer. There is now a closer blurring of search, shop and buy. The process of conversing about travel, watching travel images and video, reading user reviews and sharing knowledge drives the sale process. It inspires travel decisions and influences the purchase specifics. In his presentation this morning, Tom Klein, Group President of Sabre Travel Network used the (unattributed) statistic that 75% of shoppers spend more on online travel after consulting reviews.

What does this perfect storm mean for travel and tourism businesses? Philip explains that:

“Unlike the metrological kind, this digital kind of perfect storm provides perfect opportunity. That will be provided to travel companies that exploit new technology and the momentum and they stop worrying about business model preservation. When you concentrate on trying to preserve business models instead of preserving customers, sometimes really scary things can happen.”

He predicts that as with earlier industry transformations, there will be new agents of change, new winners and losers. That may mean that the new generation of online travel firms that ousted the establishment a decade ago, will themselves then be ousted by a newer generation of firms if they fail to respond to converging customer needs with further technical innovation.

Philip adds that in these times of upheaval, it is more important than ever before to trust your instruments and consult your intelligence, but that the stage remains set to exploit opportunity everywhere is this online perfect storm.

Good news for researchers and industry analysts then?

Scotland’s tourism industry is gathered here at Hampden Park stadium today to take part in a technology themed Tourism Innovation Day.

Tracking Tourism is both live blogging from and participating in the day and I’m hoping to share some of the insights as they emerge, while minimising typos!

The goal of the day is help tourism businesses discover, learn and apply new technology to boost productivity and improve visitor experience. As host Muriel Gray explain “technology is nothing to be afraid of at all. Today is about making sure you’re not baffled, but inspired. To show how technology can be relevant whether your business is large or small.”

Julie Franchetti of Scottish Enterprise talked this morning about the characteristics that innovative tourisms businesses share:

1) They understand their customers. They listen, they analyse, they then adapt based on what they learn from those customers.

2) They work collaboratively with other business in order to implement that innovation

3) By implenting on innovation, they actively do something about adapting and improving, thereby delivering on the promise of the key tourism assets.

She raised the critical point that the relationship between visitors and businesses has changed for ever. Successful businesses are using technology to run their business more profitably, win new customers, deliver improved experience and communicate with customers on an ongoing basis.

Julie was followed by Chief Scientist from Sabre Holdings, Dr Ben Vinod. Sabre are the people behind Travelocity, igougo, Lastminute.com and the Sabre Travel Network. Ben’s presentation warrents a post of its own - which will follow - but with Sabre processing 2 billion travel transactions a day and touching 80% of 2006 travellers, he knows what he’s talking about when it comes to travel technology.

Interestingly, Ben reckons 2008 is the year that consumer generated content has become mainstream, that consumers have reached a point when they are demanding businesses support their desire to see what other trustworthy users think.

As a participant in the feedback session I must earn my keep now and post again shortly!

Time to stop searching and start finding

Love ‘em or loathe ‘em, online user reviews are influential and they’re everywhere.

There’s no doubt that many tourism businesses realise the potential importance of user generated reviews. Increasingly, the evidence shows that travellers are influenced by the comments of others and most of tourism the businesses I speak to do want to manage and respond to this challenge.

But it can be an incredible struggle just to keep up with, yet alone act on, the information contained within these reviews. The sheer mass of information online means that many businesses either concentrate only on Tripadvisor, or give up on effective monitoring altogether.

For example, a survey conducted by Avalon Report showed over 90% of hoteliers think it is important to monitor reviews online, yet also found the majority of hotels monitor comments less than once every two weeks. Avalon suggest that since 87% monitor reviews manually by surfing site to site, “many of these hotel professionals appear overwhelmed by the scope of the issue, commenting they are lost in the prioritization of endless sites and searches.”

However, given the amount of effort that goes into capturing customer feedback in other aspects of the business, these freely given comments must surely have some value. Especially as unlike internally gathered comments, they are out there influencing the purchase decisions of others.

So how do tourism businesses turn online user reviews into useful research and meaningful development? I believe the answer is in tracking and monitoring online comments and reviews more effectively.

Monitoring more efficiently

There is so much potential information out there, that going site to site looking for it is simply too overwhelming. The answer is to stop surfing manually and start automating so the information comes to you.

Here are some tips how tourism businesses small and large can better grip on the online discussion that is taking place about them. Monitoring the data more effectively means you can then integrate what you find into any existing customer comment analysis process you may have. (See this previous post)

1. RSS (really simple syndication) is your friend

RSS brings your chosen web content to you through feeds as it is updated, instead of you having to visit individual sites. You can check your feedreader once a day and glance at what’s new, rather than trawl site to site, getting distracted on the way.

If you’re not already using RSS, I strongly recommend you give it a go - you’ll find you waste far less time online without missing out on the things you need to know.

Plus Tripadvisor, for example, providers feeds relating to specific properties, so you can monitor comments and respond.

Tripadvisor also produces owner feeds, which property owners can republish directly on their sites if they choose. This Travolution post explains how unedited user reviews have been welcomed by the businesses using them.

Additionally, most bloggers publish their posts as RSS feeds too (that’s what all the stuff at the top right of this blog page relates to), so you can keep an eye on key influencers in your market.

2. Set up free Google Alerts

Google alerts will email you with daily updates each time the specific terms, names and phrases of your choice are used. You can select if your alert is triggered from blogs, news, general web content etc and the frequency with which you require updating.

Personally, I find this a really handy tool and I have about 25 different alert terms running at any one time - including alerts that trigger when this blog or my name is mentioned online.

The downside is false positives, but your terms are easy to edit and amend so you can experiment to get the combination of alerts that best meet your needs.

3. Third party tools to track buzz, comments and online word of mouth

There are a number of free tools, such as the following, that let you monitor the key phases, company names or specific terms that matter to your business.

• Blogpulse’s Trend Search tracks buzz over time for certain key words, phrases or links
• Blogpulse’s Conversation Tracker assembles a snapshot of blog conversations

You can also find more tools at this Smashing Magazine post on Web 2.0 buzz monitoring.

And of course, there are also the paid tools you can also buy in to monitor and aggregate your online reviews and comments.

I’m not in a position to recommend specific paid tools as I have always found the freely available and open source tools meet my needs just fine - but I appreciate there are contexts in which paid tools fit the bill. So do feel free to tell me if you have a paid solution you couldn’t live without (no direct selling though please).

4. Build your own custom solution

For the larger business, or the somewhat technically minded, it is surprisingly easy to build yourself an in house, customer system to monitor want you want and format data how you need it.

Yahoo Pipes is an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator. Using Pipes, you can create and combine feeds to make them more powerful, useful and relevant. This Lifehacker post shows you how.

On a larger scale, if you’re running your own servers and dealing with really high volumes of online comments and conversations, I’d suggest checking out the BuzzMonitor developed by the World Bank.

As Pierre Guillaume Wielezynski of the World Bank explains:

“Like many organizations, we started listening to blogs and other forms of social media by subscribing to a blog search engine RSS feed but quickly understood it was not enough. The World Bank is a global institution and we needed to listen in multiple languages, across multiple platforms. We needed something that would aggregate all this content, help us make sense of it and allow us to collaborate around it. At the time, no solution (either commercial or open source) met those requirements so we decided to build our own.”

BuzzMonitor is an open source application that “listens in” to what people are saying across blogs and other sites in order to help the organisation understand and engage in social media. It is available as packaged, open source application. While it was developed for Linux-compatible platforms, it should be possible to install it on a Windows system, as well. (So time to call your techies!)

Moving from searching to researching

So from tracking a few terms through Google Alerts, to the monitoring the whole world from your own server - there are some great tools out there to help you automate the collection of online user generated content, comments and word of mouth.

Instead of wasting your time gathering information manually, automating the process will leave you in a position where you can start constructively responding to what you hear. That way you can get past being overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of online noise, and start reacting quickly and strategically as required.

Do you find this process overwhelming? Are you using tools I haven’t mentioned here? Do let me know!

Just like any DIY project, botched research has the potential to be a messy, costly disaster.

If you’re making the effort to do customer or market research to support your decisions, you’re committing time and money in the expectation that your business will see a positive benefit from your efforts.

The trouble is how do you know if the evidence you’re using to base your decisions on is flawed? Could your research efforts actually be creating you bigger problems? Problems that may only become apparent after you have committed considerable expenditure.

Here’s an example that one of my fellow forum members at 5000bc.com kindly shared:

Some years ago now a colleague and I surveyed local businesses on potential training courses. We got a clear cut positive response in the training and the preferred courses… But when we actually advertised the courses the response was zero.

Despite their best efforts, this business was left out of pocket when no one purchased the courses they so carefully researched.

This kind of story is really common and it’s one the reasons why you’ll often be told that research is best left to the experts. But it doesn’t work like that in the real world! People always have and always will do there own research, for obvious reasons of cost and practicality.

So here are some practical tips to help you get your DIY research right

These are five common mistakes that can turn your research efforts into a business liability:

1. You load the dice to get the answer you’re looking for

One of the problems with doing your own research is that you are so invested in it, so personally involved, that you can dramatically influence the results.

It is easy to fall into the trap of asking leading questions, meaning that your expected answer is clearly apparent to the respondent. For example “Did you enjoy our lovingly prepared food?”, “Do you think we’re right to be investing in reducing our emissions” or “Don’t you agree that towels should only be washed every two days.”

Your physical presence can also cause you to get the answer you seek. Your research respondents will mostly likely want to please you or avoid offending and given the chance will tell you precisely what you want to hear. You will reinforce this further if you find yourself nodding or verbally agreeing with their “correct” responses, or give them other clues about what you would prefer them to say.

So, when conducting your own research, try to keep your intent hidden and present a neutral, uninvested air.

2. Right questions, wrong people

The most common error I see amongst the teams of school pupils running their own businesses for Young Enterprise is that they design a product for to sell to their parents’ age group, yet they conduct their research amongst their teenage peers.

It is the same mistake as the HIPPO syndrome (making business decisions based on the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion).

You, your family, your friends and your resident HIPPO do not represent your target research population. It is very important that your research sample is representative of the market whose opinions you are seeking.

Put simply, if you want to find out how ferry users think and feel, don’t centre your research around airport users.

3. Right questions, wrong environment

How often do you change your underwear? Do you ever wear the same socks three days in a row?

If I asked you these questions in a focus group, surrounded by other people claiming to always change their socks twice a day, how likely would you be to admit the truth?

What about if I asked you the same question face to face? Personally, it’d need to be an anonymous paper or online survey, before I’d ever confess to performing the occasional sniff test on my socks.

Think carefully when conducting DIY - especially if you’re asking something personal or contentious - in case you are creating a situation where people will be too reluctant to tell you what they really think.

4. Failing to corroborate the evidence

Trusting just one source of evidence leaves you really exposed if that data is flawed. Professional researchers will typically combine several research methods to give a range of perspectives - for example, surveys, one to one interviews and focus groups combined.

Even if you’re using online data, rather than conducting direct research yourself, don’t rely on a single source of information. You’ll find dramatic different results when comparing different sources (especially if the process of repeating the information has obscured the original context and margins of error associated with the data).

And don’t forget, testing is a form of research. Putting a bunch of different offers or products on pre-sale and measuring which ones attract interest can be a useful way of corroborating your other research.

5. Good evidence, bad decisions

As this BBC article explains, the human mind is pretty irrational.

Despite good evidence, poor analysis means that bad decisions are made. There are many complex reasons for this, but here are some common ones you may have experienced:

• Deliberately or otherwise, you pick and choose from the evidence in order to “prove” your preferred theory
• Regardless of the evidence, your selective perception means you see exactly what you want to see
• The evidence we heard most recently or most emphatically take on undeserved importance
• We get blinded by averages.

The average visitor does not exist, instead averages (the mean) can hide meaningful differences in behaviour and give an overly rosy worldview. I know plenty of businesses that think their average website visitor stays for 5 mins, whereas in fact 95% of visits last for under a minute and a handful last for hours.

To conclude

So, there are pitfalls and risks to DIY research and it is harder to do it right than many people realise. But keeping these five common mistakes in mind when you are conducting your own customer, market or business research may help you avert a costly disaster.

I’m collecting DIY research disaster stories right now - I’d love to hear about any business problems you may have encountered based on using dodgy research.