Josef A. Mazanec

Tourism Destination Competitiveness: From Definition to Explanation?

This article contributes to the recent literature on tourism destination competitiveness including the gargantuan compilations of competitiveness factors by Ritchie and Crouch (2003), or Dwyer and Kim (2003), and, particularly, the widely known prototype of a Competitiveness Monitor (CM) initiated by the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC). The central question underlying this article is whether an arrangement of data such as the CM can be transformed from a purely definitional system into an explanatory model. A number of criticisms regarding the way of constructing the CM, its epistemological nature, and the absence of any accessibility factors lead to a moderately revised system that is explored by latent variable modeling. The empirical findings support this type of model, which tends to better explain the levels of tourism activity already achieved than sustained tourism growth. A discussion of the detailed results produces several recommendations on how to adjust the future strategy of research on destination competitiveness.

Marketing management and tourism

Abstract Tourism services are generally provided by various business and government organizations. To the greatest extent, they provide services to the traveling public. The marketing and management of these services exchanges are the thrust of this paper. This paper focuses on the management and information analysis tasks of these organizations within a marketing context. An overview of the fit with management literature philosophies is provided at the macro-level, while at the micro-level the paper pursues marketing science and marketing research contexts for tourism research. The service encounter, its conduct, direction, and information needs are emphasized.

A nonparametric approach to perceptions-based market segmentation : foundations

Perceptual market structure and strategy formation (J. A. Mazanec): Market segmentation Getting prepared for PBMS The analytical challenges Conventional methodology Implementing PBMS.- Statistical Foundations (H. Strasser): Reduction of Complexity Analysis of Consumer Perceptions.

Tourism destination competitiveness: second thoughts on the world economic forum reports

The Travel and Tourism Competitiveness Reports of the World Economic Forum elaborate the Travel and Tourism Competitiveness Index (TTCI) as an overall measure of destination competitiveness for 130 economies worldwide. From a tourism management point of view, a measure such as the TTCI is expected to be instrumental in explaining and predicting the tourism performance of receiving countries. This study explores several ways to transform the TTCI into a formative structural model. Partial least squares path modelling, PLS regression, mixture modelling and non-linear covariance-based structural equation modelling are applied to examine the TTCIs predictive power. The analysis probes possible measures for improvement. The destination countries may be subject to unobserved heterogeneity with regard to how the various constituents of competitiveness act on tourism performance. Interaction phenomena seem to prohibit a simple cause–effect pattern and non-linear relationships show encouraging results.

Computer-assisted travel counseling

Abstract Reliable and efficient access to relevant travel alternatives is a key ingredient for successful travel counseling. Computers can now assist travel counselors to provide better service to potential tourists. Lack of experience of a counselor may be offset by following the suggestions prompted on a computer monitor during the sales talk. Computer assistance in travel counseling may take two main forms: expert systems and retrieval approaches. This paper examines prototypes of these two approaches with a view to describing their main features as well as their respective strengths and weaknesses. The problems of implementation are discussed and recommendations for further action are proposed.

Consumers’ Preferred Criteria for Hotel Online Booking

Online bookings of hotels have increased drastically in recent years. Studies in tourism and hospitality have investigated the relevance of hotel attributes influencing choice but not yet explore them in an online booking setting. This paper presents findings about consumers’ stated preferences for decision criteria from an adaptive conjoint study among 346 respondents. The results show that recommendations of friends and online reviews are the most important factors that influence online hotel booking. Partitioning the importance values of the decision criteria reveals group-specific differences indicating the presence of market segments.

Neural market structure analysis

Over the last decade various parametric approaches toward modelling segmented perception‐preference structures such as combined MDS and latent class procedures have been introduced. These methods, however, are not tailored for qualitative data describing consumers’ redundant and fuzzy perceptions of brand images. A completely different method is based on topology‐sensitive vector quantization (VQ) for consumers‐by‐brands‐by‐attributes data. It maps the segment‐specific perceptual structures into bubble‐pie‐bar charts with multiple brand positions demonstrating perceptual distinctiveness or similarity. Though the analysis proceeds without any distributional assumptions, it allows for significance testing. The application of exploratory and inferential data processing steps to the same database is statistically sound and particularly attractive for market structure analysts. A brief outline of the VQ method is followed by a sample study with travel market data, which proved to be particularly troublesome for conventional processing tools.

Competition among European Tourist Cities: A Comparative Analysis with Multidimensional Scaling and Self-Organizing Maps

The tourism researchers attention is drawn to the neurocomputing methodology of self-organizing maps (SOMs) SOMs can be used to find a radically parsimonious representation of multidimensional profile data. The properties of an SOM network are explored in a case study on the competitive relationships between European cities as tourist destinations. SOM results are compared with a conventional INDSCAL model. The database consists of the guest mix profiles of 26 major tourist cities between 1975 and 1992.

Simultaneous positioning and segmentation analysis with topologically ordered feature maps: a tour operator example

Abstract Positioning analysis seeks spatial representations of brands. Segmentation analysis searches for perceptually or preferentially homogeneous consumer segments. While these analytical steps often are taken sequentially, the positioning and segmentation problems are interrelated and need to be treated simultaneously. Topologically ordered feature maps (self-organizing maps, SOM) are neural network models for feature extraction and classification. Extracting prototypes corresponds with finding market segments; ordering them topologically resembles a perceptual mapping exercise. SOM modeling may thus be relevant for deriving low-dimensional and parsimonious representations of multidimensional profile data. The application of SOMs is explored in a case study on tour operator images. The results simultaneously inform about the firms’ image positions and their perceptually homogeneous customer segments.

Allocating an advertising budget to international travel markets

Abstract Deciding on advertising appropriations is a common problem to all National Tourist Offices. The Austrian National Tourist Office now employs a decision support model allowing for inclusion of managerial judgments. In tourism, like elsewhere, application of standard optimization routines to marketing decision making is straight- forward, once the relationship linking market response to input has been modeled adequately. A tailor-made decision calculus procedure eliciting managerial judgments on the relative importance of the factors determining a receiving countrys travel market share provides the weights otherwise inaccessible by objective parameter estimation. A tourism manager thus can evaluate countries as tourism generators and allocate an advertising budget accordingly.