NB: This is a guest article by Dimitrios Buhalis, deputy director at the International Centre for Tourism and Hospitality Research and Nicolas Gregori, PhD researcher, both from Bournemouth University.
Developments in information and communication technologies are boosting the pace of change in the tourism and hospitality industry and the pressure to compete for customers on a global scale is increasing constantly.
At the same time, consumer needs are changing quickly and their demands are getting more complex and sophisticated.
Moreover, by embracing social media tools and real-time communication over the Internet consumers are more empowered than ever before.
There is a new coffee to wake up to and smell each morning.
The tourism industry does not have the luxury of responding and adapting their service offerings over long periods of time any more.
Hence, valuable brands have to tackle this challenge, as their success or failure depends increasingly on the agility, flexibility and the competitive speed at which they respond to the dynamic changes in customers’ needs.
This in turn requires a real-time understanding and awareness of consumers’ preferences and needs. Increasingly competitive advantage will depend on the ability of organisations to engage interactively with their global consumers.
However, the development and redesign of service offerings, as a response to changes in consumers’ preferences, is a long lasting and iterative process. It requires an in-depth understanding of consumers’ true wants and needs, and once created constant adaptation based on consumers’ feedback is necessary.
Given the slow speed of the development process and the incorporation of customer feedback into existing offerings, tourism organisations are limited in their capabilities to respond quickly to dynamic changes in demand and customer requirements.
Against this background social media acts a catalyst of change.
Micro-blogging, context based services, and dynamic social media platforms offer companies the possibility to instantly engage with their customers at all stages of the travel planning (before, during, after), to gain deep insights into tourists wants and needs in almost real-time and retrieve direct feedback.
Therefore, by monitoring social media, tourism and hospitality tourism and companies are enabled to create a “nervous system” that senses the dynamic changes in customer wants and needs constantly. This has far reaching implications for the management of hospitality and tourism services.
Embracing real-time enabled technologies allows proactive responses to customers’ desires by creating flexible and agile services on the spot or by adapting existing service offerings instantly.
Also it increases the speed of customer feedback loops and therefore provides opportunities for both the identification and successful recovery of service failures. A plethora of consumer studies has shown that the vast majority of travellers (85%-95%) don’t actually voice complaints.
In addition, the “service recovery paradox” tells us that customers, who have experienced a successful service recovery are on average more satisfied than consumers, who did not experience any service failure at all.
Real-time social media enabled service management is key to achieving growth and service excellence in a highly competitive market.
NB: This is a guest article by Dimitrios Buhalis, deputy director at the International Centre for Tourism and Hospitality Research and Nicolas Gregori, PhD researcher, both from Bournemouth University.
NB2: The International Federation for IT in Travel and Tourism (IFITT) is holding a FREE workshop (Technology and Social Media-enabled Real-Time Service Management in Tourism and Hospitality)Â on Monday 7 November 2011 at World Travel Market in London, 10am to 12am, Platinum Suite 1. More details.
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These are cutting edge issues and we look forward to discuss them at
Monday 7th November 2011 Platinum Suite 1 from 11.00 – 13.00
IFITT Conference @ WTM IFITT@ World Travel Market 2011
http://www.wtmlondon.com/page.cfm/action=Seminars/SeminarID=1
Technology and Social Media enabled Real-time Service Management in Hospitality and Tourism
http://www.ifitt.org/home/view/IFITT@WTM Register on ifitt.eventbrite.com
Good points Dimitrios. I doubt that I’ll be at WTM this year so wish you well with your discussions. They do bring back memories of the late 1990s when I was teased for applying the word Intelligent to Destination Management Systems and explaining why in 2001 web services would turn the industry on its head. Around that time Leon Benjamin and I were trying to explain what “business webs” (Don Tapscott’s term ) and value networks would look like in the travel sector
See: http://www.slideshare.net/AnnaP/presentation-to-hedna-2001
and: http://www.slideshare.net/AnnaP/web-services-tandt1 and 2001 paper on the Tourism Ecosystem: http://www.slideshare.net/AnnaP/tourismecosystemwhitepaperwtm
Incidentally, we were right about web services – see Valyn Perini’s predictions for IT Infrastructure in TNOOZ 2011 predictions (http://bit.ly/nEcrtL); but not so right about it turning the industry on its head! It’s still not that easy for operators of small hotels and B& Bs to provide an online concierge service using a simple widget but it should be. I even think that the large hotel chains have been slow to seize the opportunity to become the weary traveler’s best friend.
http://www.slideshare.net/AnnaP/thinking-outside-the-hotel-box-final
As to a digital nervous system well yes – tourism is not an industry but a dynamic complex, adaptive system and internet connectivity is its neural network. The more connections in a networked system the more intelligent it becomes.
See post Can we Create “Intelligent” Destinations? (http://desticorp.typepad.com/desticorp/destinations/)
That’s why having wifi in hotels is so important. Any network is only as strong as the weakest link in its chain. Hence my point that DMOs should “do” less and enable more – see comments to Troy Thompson’s (@travel2dot0) reflective post of yesterday: http://ow.ly/6NxPy
I believe that the takeaways we offered to HEDNA in 2001 are as relevant today as 11 years ago
* Think “infrastructure” not sites
* Think ecology not technology
* Companies don’t look after guests – people do!
* Unleash the creativity, curiosity and passion of your people
* To find the Holy Grail: never cease asking the question: how may I serve you?
As I’m not sure that I’ll be able to make WTM this year I offer up these comments as my contribution in absentia. Rightly or wrongly I’m convinced that we’ll only make serious progress when enough of us share a common mindset (paradigm) about tourism i.e., it’s not an industry but a community and when we apply the science of networks and complexity to our understanding of it. That’s why I’m developing an e learning platform for small medium suppliers (that make up 95-99%) of the tourism ecosystem see: http://www.conscioustourism.wordpress.com Once they truly “get it” the “industry” will really be turned on its head and tourism might have a fighting chance of warranting the adjective “responsible”!
Finally, the biggest challenge of the next decade will be managing demand as it will exceed the capacity of many hot spots to supply. Look at the demise of Venice; (see Venetians Mourn the Death of their City – http://bit.ly/oqCkdh); the pressure on the Galapagos and Machu Pichu. An intelligent IT infrastructure that can feedback demand, supply and impact data in real time will become essential if a visitor’s quality experience is to be assured. Again Valyn Perini’s (Open Travel Alliance) predictions on this issue were spot on.
PS – isn’t it amazing that with all our sophistication, we still can’t enter hyperlinks into text editors used for comments!!
PPS – forgive the length and allowing me to go down memory lane
I should have known that TNOOZ would use a sophisticated text editor – thanks TNOOZ
Hi Dimitrios,
I liked your article, although it is does just more or less roughly unveil the deep going consequences Of social media to the tourism industry. I recently published an article about social media monitoring, which clearly points out, what it really means to DMOs to integrate a monitoring and reaction procedure into their classic hierarchies and business structures. Staff needs to be qualified, the politics needs to be incorporated due to it’s influence on financing, leadership has to change from dominance and control towards to open innovation and empowerment of staff, information politics has to share instead of care, etc.
The service recovery paradox on is a good point to be stated in that context and this input from your side actually was a new perspective for me…
@Anna – thanks for the comment! These statements were particularly interesting…! Do you know the ideacamp theses? They are in German but maybe google translate might solvethis challenge… Just have a look at them at http://www.ideacamp.info
Best regards,
Daniel Amer
find me on twitter.com/Daniel_amer