Category: Reflective Posts

Through the guest lecture from Amy Thompson, I had an in-depth understanding of how DMOs, especially Tourism Kamloops, take the advantages of online tools and platforms into their digital marketing strategies, including target markets, key contents and channels. Based on the tourist geography, in the pre COVID-19, Tourism Kamloops focused on 3 main markets, which are BC and Alberta, Ontario who mostly travel to Sun Peaks, and travel trade market who travel primarily through tour operators for longer stays and willing to spend more. From the demographical aspect, the major types of tourists to Kamloops are young families and couples who are mostly travelling by cars and airlines, as well as looking for affordable experiences, nature-based activities and places where they can escape from the crowd. In order to approach and engage with these markets, Tourism Kamloops are telling stories from locals and travel influencers to highlight the images of Kamloops where visitors can access to a variety of hiking and biking trails, golf courses and wineries surrounding by amazing landscapes, peaceful atmosphere and friendly locals. Moreover, they also utilize effectively the user-generated contents by encouraging people to share their experiences using the hashtag #explorekamloops as well as launching the Lov’n the loops project on Instagram and Facebook pages. By doing so, Tourism Kamloops is able to spread more insightful messages and interact more with the visitors during their experiences. From the lecture, I can understand the important role of DMOs in inspiring people to travel, as well as supporting and collaborating with local tourism businesses to build a strong branded image of a destination.

The use of map is not just for locating where you are or navigating which way you should go, but also for many purposes, especially in tourism. Through the tourism planning tools class, I am interested in two special uses of map which are the customer journey map by Mind Tools (n.d.) and the Participatory Approach in Geographic Information Tourism (PAGIS) by Hasse and Milne (2006). Firstly, the customer journey map is a useful tool for businesses to evaluate themselves by understanding how the customers think, feel and experience at each point of interaction with the businesses. Basically, to create this map, the business needs to identify the touch points with their customers and analyze what customers are experiencing and feeling in each interacting point. Based on the analyzing results, the business is able to see a bigger picture through the customers’ views and clarify which problems they need to solve or what they can do to enhance customer experiences. Moreover, National Geographic is running a map guide project based on geotourism and PAGIS. This project aims to collect local knowledge to create map inventories, which focuses on ecotourism and sustainable destinations. By involving the local community in the mapping process, the project brings great benefits not only to tourists and businesses, but also to the communities as it allows the local to participate actively to the tourism development. Furthermore, partnering with National Geographic is a great marketing opportunity for DMOs in promoting the destinations with a mass audience who care about nature and travel responsibly. These ideas gave me a broader perspective of the role of maps in tourism planning and its benefits to the guests and the hosts, as well as other tourism sectors.

Through the visitor experience class, I am able to understand and apply different frameworks for the tourism experiences such as the tourist experience conceptual model, the progression of economic value and the Atlas of Experience. According to the tourist experience conceptual model (Cutler et al, 2010), tourist experience is influenced not just by physical factors but also by the social aspects and the service itself. Additionally, the tourist experience has 5 main outcomes which are knowledge, memory, perception, emotion and self-identify. The model gives tourism businesses ideas to create and improve their services and experiences that value to their customers. Another important model is the progression of economic value by Pine and Gilmore (2013). Based on this model, through customization, we can extract the commodities to manufacture goods, customize goods to deliver services, and individualize services to create experiences. For example, people tend to pay more for the wine tasting experiences than just a bottle of wine, as they can bring home not just the wine but also the enjoyable memories with their loved one. In this class, I am also inspired by the Atlas of Experience by Swaaij and Klare (2000). This is a really interesting way of using map to help both tourist and business to understand the emotional outcomes of tourist experiences. This special map gives more insightful ideas and feelings of how people are motivated and what they expect to experience in their trips. I believe that all these concepts are helpful for me in tourism product development in my future career.