Eric Laws

The Marketing of Hospitality and Leisure Experiences

In this article the authors introduce the concept of the experience economy and examine areas of debate in the tourism literature concerning the concept of experience.

Crisis Management: A Suggested Typology

SUMMARY This paper explores the current state of research on the study of crisis and its management from a tourism perspective. Given the increasing interest in this area of research the authors suggest a typology of terms used to describe research into issues related to tourism crisis. The aim of the paper is to offer a common starting point for discussion but not to attempt to provide prescriptive definitions.

Tourism Crises and Marketing Recovery Strategies

SUMMARY The recent frequency and intensity of crises and disasters affecting the tourism industry has resulted in a growing body of research into their causes, effects and management, as the bibliographies of the ensuing papers catalogue. To date, most papers and collections of research have taken a broad approach, describing the origins of a particular event which triggered a tourism crises, followed by an examination of the differential effects of the crisis on local residents, staff, tourists and tourism organizations or the environment and infrastructure. They have also discussed rescue efforts and the complexity of management tasks in the immediate aftermath of an event, often pointing to the need for preplanning to mitigate the consequences of any future disaster. Other researchers have contributed directly to the academic debate about how to theorise tourism crisis management, often by drawing on the wider crisis management literature. The present collection of research differs in that it focuses on one phase of the tasks which managers face after the immediate consequences of a crisis have been dealt with. This phase addresses the question of how to rebuild the market for a tourism service or a destination which has experienced a significant catastrophe, and how to learn from the experience in planning for future crisis response strategies. It is suggested in this paper that the challenges are actually more varied and complex than is implied by the suggestion, found in much of the literature, that the task is about ‘restoring normality.’ The chaos and complexity experienced in the aftermath of a crisis raise general issues of how organizations learn and adapt to change.

Tourism crises and disasters: Enhancing understanding of system effects

SUMMARY This paper examines the definitions and conceptual foundations of crises and distinguishes between crises and disasters. It takes a systems view of these concepts and uses the perspective of systems as organizational networks to examine implications for tourism managers. A tourism destination is perceived as consisting of a network of interacting organizations. This perspective questions the boundaries that should be used to study crisis and disasters. The paper also discusses the possibility of a crisis having a positive outcome for a destination.

Advances in service networks research

Networks are an important area of study for the services industries. The guest editors of this volume contend that networks are indeed a fundamental feature of services – services intangibility makes service providers heavily dependent on the recommendations of others to direct customers to a particular business; makes acquisition of knowledge about customers and competitors more difficult and often leads to exchange of information through knowledge networks. Fluctuations in services demand are perhaps more difficult to deal with as the ‘product’ cannot be stockpiled, but one strategy to deal with this is to work within a referral network to cater to demand peaks. Services require people to be engaged in their production. This leads to an increased proportion of smaller firms in the service industries because scaling up volume is more difficult with people involved. These are just a few of the reasons why networks in the service industries are important. This introduction to the special issue on advances in service network research concludes that firstly, many of the concepts of central concern for service researchers, especially those interested in inter-organisational relationships, are related to concepts that have been developed from, and studied using, the network perspective. Secondly, there is a need to move to the use of more quantitative techniques for network analysis and lastly, recent developments in network research show much promise in the use of complex systems mathematical techniques to simulate and model networks and the effect of interventions. Thus it is possible to provide suggestions as to how a network may evolve over time and inform those involved within networks as to the relative advantages of alternative modes of action. Overall this collection of papers indicates that there are significant opportunities for further research in this emergent field of study.

Understanding and sharing knowledge of new tourism markets: the example of Australia's inbound Chinese tourism.

SUMMARY This paper examines issues involved in the definition, creation, and use of knowledge about the Chinese outbound market. It provides an initial view of the type of knowledge required by tourism managers in Australia, some suggestions about where this knowledge is available, or how it may be produced, and identifies issues in sharing that knowledge between tourism industry members and between academics and the industry.

Identifying and Managing the Consumerist Gap

An interrupted service may yield less satisfaction than clients had anticipated when purchasing it. This Consumerist Gap may result in adverse consequences for clients, staff and company. A case study illustrates how passengers experienced a delay to their journey, and a model is developed to trace their changing levels of dissatisfaction during the interruption episode. The paper outlines ways in which management can influence the extent of consumer dissatisfaction while technical procedures are implemented to restore the service.

Tourism research: building from other disciplines

Tourism as a field of study is challenged to identify a theoretical core and disciplinary boundaries. While the phenomena of tourism may be considered a system of interlinked parts, the scholarly body of knowledge of tourism may be described as a mosaic of knowledge. This paper identifies a number of methodological problems that tourism research must address. We further propose that future study should focus its attention on core issues of tourism related to the consumers pursuit of difference in their travel. Further, these core issues should be addressed using the most appropriate disciplinary theory and methodology providing the data needed to produce a holistic picture for deeper analysis.

Distortions in Tourism Development in the Dali Autonomous Region, China

This paper presents a tourism destination development sequence for Dali, Yunnan Province, China. The development of Dali highlights limits in the power of the local government as the lead stakeholder, which took a top-down approach to economic development. The government sought to address increasing control of the tourism sector by external tour operators through increasing its own control of local tourism attractions. This approach has been only partially successful in reducing distortions in the tourism channel. The origins of these distortions are described and analysed. A number of additional responses are suggested to improve the local benefits obtained from the inflow of tourists to this new destination area including development of a more market oriented competitive strategy that seeks to co-opt stakeholders into collaborative activities.

Hospitality, tourism, and lifestyle concepts: implications for quality management and customer satisfaction.

ABSTRACT This article provides an overview of the significance of the lifestyle concept for the management of service quality and customer satisfaction in the hospitality and tourism industry. It discusses aspects of its continuing evolution and outlines the contents of articles relevant to this volume, providing a brief summary of the articles collected. It concludes by identifying a number of opportunities for further research into hospitality and tourism lifestyle concepts.