Nina Mistilis

Tourism gateways and regional economies: the distributional impacts of MICE.

The meetings, incentives, conventions and exhibitions (MICE) industry is a rapidly expanding sector of tourism world-wide, but particularly in the Asia Pacific region. Of the many challenges underlying development of this sector none is more important than determining the economic benefits from devoting resources to industry growth. The paper argues that although research has been undertaken on the economic impacts of MICE events and MICE destinations, regionally and nationally, the issue of the distribution of these benefits between tourism gateways and more remote regions has been neglected. The paper seeks to help remedy this neglect. It presents a framework for assessing the economic impacts of the MICE industry in a regional economy. It then illustrates how the framework can be used to compare economic impacts of MICE tourism in destination gateways and more remote areas, with the use of Australian data. The paper draws attention to the types of data deficiencies that seem to be endemic to estimating the economic impacts of MICE, and which constitute a barrier to informed public policy making and planning. Finally, the implications are discussed for development of MICE tourism generally. Copyright

Knowledge management for tourism crises and disasters.

This article focuses on the need for destinations to create a knowledge-based system to assist with crisis and disaster management. After laying out the unique needs of the tourism industry for knowledge when disaster strikes, the article describes a knowledge framework designed to assist in such situations. This framework suggests three separate knowledge bases to deal with the three stages of a disaster. Knowledge Base 1, the precrisis stage, deals with knowledge retrieval and storage; Knowledge Base 2, the stage during the crisis, deals with knowledge processing; and Knowledge Base 3, the postcrisis stage, deals with knowledge dissemination. The contents of each knowledge base are identified in detail and a recommendation for public sector leadership in implementation of such a system is discussed.

Future eDestination Marketing Perspective of an Australian Tourism Stakeholder Network

Tourism destinations are difficult to manage because of the complex relationships of their diverse public and private stakeholders. At the same time, strategic marketing efforts are important for destinations to foster positive consequences of tourism, particularly given the range of opportunities and challenges created by the emergence of social media that destinations can use advantageously. This article aims to explore future eDestination marketing from Australian tourism stakeholder network perspectives. Workshops were convened in July 2012 in Melbourne, Australia, for select stakeholders invited to contribute to the futures national tourism technology strategy. They presented a stakeholder network approach to futures strategy development that aims to contribute to that used in recent national tourism plans and strategies for Australia developed by the government. Building on theories of stakeholder networks and futures, the article demonstrates the value of a futures stakeholder network method compared to traditional government approaches by critically analyzing outcomes of both.

Challenges for competitive strategy in public and private sector partnerships in electronic national tourist destination marketing systems.

Abstract There are challenges and issues in the business environment for sustainable public and private sector partnerships in electronic national tourism destination marketing systems (DMS). These challenges and issues for partnerships, and their implications for the competitive strategy of the DMS, have been neglected in the research literature to date. The article documents the evolution of the need for, and trend to, public/private sector partnerships in electronic national DMS and explores the challenges and issues for their successful development. It then analyses the implications of such partnerships for the competitive strategy of the electronic national DMS and concludes with suggestions for further research regarding partnership, strategy and electronic national DMSs.

Information technology and tourism education in Australia: an industry view of skills and qualities required in graduates.

As technology increasingly becomes the driving engine for productivity improvement and business opportunities for enterprises in the 21st century, tourism and hospitality education and training must address these developments and aim at enhancing the ability of future managers to use a variety of IT tools and strategies to increase their organisation’s efficiency and responsiveness in the global market place. Following an ENTER 98 workshop on IT curriculum development for tourism and hospitality courses, the authors of this paper undertook to examine the Australian tourism industry’s needs and views in relation to information technology training and education. The findings suggest that operational IT skills take a greater priority over strategic management and marketing skills.

Information Technology and Service Standards in MICE Tourism

Abstract The meetings, incentives, conventions, and exhibitions (MICE) sector of tourism is growing rapidly worldwide and particularly in the Asia Pacific region. One of the important challenges posed by rapid growth of this sector is to maintain service standards in a context of intense competition for this form of tourism. In particular, the development of skills in information technology is regarded as essential to the provision of quality service to tourists. After providing a brief outline of the MICE sector and its major stakeholders, the paper proceeds to highlight the importance of information technology in tourism generally and MICE tourism specifically. It then addresses issues of concern and identifies areas for further research to help the nations MICE sector achieve competitive advantage.

Assessing the E-capability of Visitor Information Centers:

Visitor information centers (VICs) play an important role in the promotion of tourist destinations to potential visitors because of their unique position as information providers. The nature of their information provision is however changing, primarily in response to the evolving information infrastructure. These changes to information delivery have in turn many implications for the users of this information. This article considers the varying information needs of virtual and face-to-face users of VICs and examines how VICs can meet their needs in the context of the changing information infrastructure. The article develops a taxonomy of the information tasks performed by virtual visitors as well as of their motivations, matched to provision of appropriate media, which it then uses to assess the e-capability of Australian VICs in meeting the information needs of visitors. Although Australian data are used, the findings are of interest and importance to VICs globally.

Partnership Australia’s National Tourism Data Warehouse: Preliminary Assessment Of A Destination Marketing System

Much has been written since the early 1980’s about Destination Marketing Systems (DMSs), particularly in the form of case studies most of which seem to reflect a high degree of system failure (eg BRAVO, Hi-Line, ETNA and earlier versions of the Gulliver system). Indeed Archdale has characterised this field as follows: “the overall pattern of systems development in the field has been diverse, geographically disparate and generally reactive. This has led to a confused pattern of business objectives, a marked absence of technical, commercial or data definition standards, a plethora of often conflicting developments within individual countries and little evidence of inter-NTO cooperation or even formal discussion on the issue” (Archdale et al: 1992). Whilst some of such shortcomings have been addressed during the intervening years by new developments, the Australian situation has been similarly characterised by a multiplicity of websites and/or destination marketing systems displaying information at varying levels of quality, content and format.