Sherrie Wei

Profiling the Senior Traveler: An Australian Perspective

Recently, the behavior of senior travelers has become an important area of interest because of its market size and potential for growth. This study describes a study profiling senior travelers according to their demographic and psychographic characteristics. Six market segments were used to highlight the differences that exist in terms of holiday attractions, travel motivations, and information sources used among senior travelers when planning and choosing a holiday. Seniors are shown not to be a uniform conservative market, which has implications for marketing and product development.

Segmenting the market of West Australian senior tourists using an artificial neural network

Abstract Measuring perceptions of customers can be a major problem for marketers of tourism and travel services. Much of the problem is to determine which attributes carry most weight in the purchasing decision. Older travellers weigh many travel features before making their travel decisions. This paper presents a descriptive analysis of neural network methodology and provides a research technique that assesses the weighting of different attributes and uses an unsupervised neural network model to describe a consumer-product relationship. The development of this rich class of models was inspired by the neural architecture of the human brain. These models mathematically emulate the neurophysical structure and decision making of the human brain, and, from a statistical perspective, are closely related to generalised linear models. Artificial neural networks or neural networks are, however, nonlinear and do not require the same restrictive assumptions about the relationship between the independent variables and dependent variables. Using neural networks is one way to determine what trade-offs older travellers make as they decide their travel plans. The sample of this study is from a syndicated data source of 200 valid cases from Western Australia. From senior groups, active learner, relaxed family body, careful participants and elementary vacation were identified and discussed.

Uses of the Internet in the global hotel industry

This article discusses a study carried out among the membership of Global Hoteliers, an organization of executives in the international hotel industry. The study looked into the uses of the Internet, such as the World Wide Web and E-mail, and at any organizational and geographical influences on those uses. Hotel size, star rating, and hotel type were among the organizational factors which had some significant effect on certain aspects of the information hotels posted on the Web and on the use of E-mail. Similarly, the geographical location of hotels was also found to have a significant effect. The similarities and differences of the use of the Internet among global hotels call for future research into the relationships between market segmentation, organizational buying behavior, hotel operations and information technology.

Tourism Product Development for the Senior Market, Based on Travel-Motive Research

Because the number of seniors (aged 60-plus) in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States roughly constitutes upto a third of the adult population in each of these countries—and this proportion is growing—there has been a considerable economic incentive for tourism marketers to sharpen their focus on older people. Many of these seniors have the desire and means to travel for pleasure, discovery and learning. But contrary to current thinking and practice in tourism marketing, this group is far from homogeneous. In this study, interviews of 356 retirees yielded data on their motives for holiday travel, preferences for holiday destination types, favourite mode of travel, and personal values. The aim was to discover how underlying travel motives and values could usefully identify unique senior tourism markets for the purpose of new product development. The results of factor analyses led to the identification of seven travel-motive segments labelled (in order of relative size) Nostalgics, Friendlies...

The senior drive tour market in Australia

Seniors are increasingly being recognised as a significant group of tourists by both the private sector and academic researchers. Drive tourism is also recognised as a significant market with the potential to stimulate new tourism development in regional areas. Together, seniors and drive tourism constitute a significant tourism market sector that has to date received little attention. This paper examines aspects of the seniors drive tourism market and finds that the majority of seniors who go on holiday travel by car, preferring the cooler non-school-holiday periods for travel. Word of mouth was found to be a significant information source for seniors. The paper also examines the likely impact of baby boomers on the senior drive market in the future, and finds that this group will have different demands from current seniors.

A gap analysis of perceptions of hotel attributes by marketing managers and older people in Australia

Surveys the perceptions of attributes of three‐ to five‐star hotels by marketing managers and by older people aged 60 and over who return to a satisfying hotel. The attributes studied were price, location, facilities, hotel restaurant, room furnishings, front‐desk efficiency and staff attitude. Usable data were analysed for 154 older consumers in Queensland, Australia, and 44 hotel marketing managers in Australia working at three‐ to five‐star hotels. Respondents’ ratings of a set of eight hotel attribute‐level scenarios were subjected to conjoint analysis in order to infer the relative importance of each attribute to both groups. Results show that both seniors and marketing managers considered hotel facilities to be the most important attribute, followed by room furnishings. The managerial implications for hotels and future research opportunities are also discussed.

Managers' perceptions of environmental issues in Australian hotels

This article describes a study carried out among management staff of Australian hotels relating to their perceptions of environmental issues and the environmental practices of their hotels. The issues surveyed included environmental accreditation, costs and financial benefits of environmental programs, customer attitudes, ‘green’ corporate images and staff orientation towards environmental practices. Out of the 165 questionnaires sent to hotel management staff, sixty-five returns were received with sixty usable for this study. The findings showed that hotel managers generally agreed that environmental accreditation could be a potential tool for improving practices in hotels since they did not see any automatic financial benefits being serving environmental practices. Hotel managers perceived customers as being ambivalent towards the environment. But, importantly, they saw being environmentally friendly as providing a good corporate image in the wider community. This may have served as a major motivation f...