Destination Management - Quality Management in Tourism and Hospitality - Coursework Example

Destination Management Report By: Professor: Class: University: City: State: Date of submission: Destination Management Report Introduction Destination management involves developing and implementing various events, activities, transportation, and stay within specified tourism location with an extensive understanding of the resources within the place (Campelo et al., 2013, p. 209). Through the decade, the international tourism market has developed due to increased application of destination management that contributes to great customer experience. Destination management is important in enabling the tourists to take full advantages of various services within the destination, which would otherwise be inaccessible to them. In this report, the aim is to evaluate various aspects of destination management and associated importance within tourism destination. Visitor experience management Research indicate that destination management is a highly dynamic process since it requires constant changes in the expectations of the customers and changes in the tourism market globally. As a result, destination management focuses on strategies that attract new and existing customers to the destination. For such reason, the destination needs to offer unique products and services to the customers. It is the role of destination management to develop the sense of uniqueness to the place with an aim of attracting new customers to the place. Destination management needs extensive understanding of the local knowledge of the destination and various opportunities that it offers. As noted earlier, destination management is a complex process that arises from the diversified scope (Wang & Pizam, 2011, p. 167). In some cases, destination management range from logistic and transport management, language translation to organization of various themed events and gala dinners. With such complexities and immense scope associated with management of destination, it might be difficult to assess destination management based on the holistic view. International tourism market has experienced numerous changes that have changed the perception of customers through promotion of tourism related activities. This has assisted to attract visitors; however, most destinations have failed to attract international customers. It therefore follows that destination management activities need to attract international customers through ensuring that re-image the destinations. It is evident that the most important aspect in destination management is its contribution to the overall experience of the visitors to a high extent that various services related to tourism. As a result, effective destination management plays important role to improve visitor experience of the destination. Tourism destinations need to have various attractions and better market within international tourism market. Visitors experience management needs to focus on various factors: marketing and promotions, destination development, and travel services (Verkuijlen, 2006, p. 144). While dealing with marketing and promotions, destinations need to focus on development of attractive adverts and marketing campaigns that aim to attract more people. Travel services involve provision of access to various services associated with hotels, transportation, and logistic support. Destination development is the most aspect of visitor experience management as it involves development of facilities, services, and products considered critical to delivering quality experience to the visitors. Developing Destination Diversity: Place, Community and Culture While developing marketing strategies for the destinations, there are many challenges often experienced with the marketers. Culture is one of the biggest problems while promoting international tourism destinations especially in another country due to diversification of cultures; as a result, there is need for adjustment of marketing strategies. Globalization has increased political, financial, social, and cultural interactions globally. Destination management involves interaction and collaboration between various entities that belong to different courtiers, which has become highly complex with increment in the numbers of international tourists. Furthermore, while marketing tourist destination, there is need to cater for the increased numbers of customers originating from diversified cultures. Using cultural activities and facilities to enhance the image of the cities, attract tourists, and enhance economic development has become widespread in the traditional cultural capital globally (Qu, Kim & Im, 2011, p. 471). Cultural tourism is becoming one of the largest and fastest-growing international tourism markets. In the current destination management practices, culture and creative business are keen on increasing these factors to promote destinations and improve their level of competitiveness and attractiveness. As a result, many destinations are actively developing their comparative advantages especially with increasing level of competitiveness within tourism marketplace and creation of a high level of distinctiveness with increased globalization. Various strategies might be used to protect and manage cultural diversity within the destinations. These strategies include ensuring adequate and effective visitor management and proper conservation of culture and various historic heritage sites through the hard management practices, influencing a responsible behavior of the tourists towards the local communities, and effective development of interpretation and education that accommodate the needs of both the visitors and residents. With increasing needs of the tourists, cultural tourism is increasingly becoming the new area of tourism demand especially with destination managers recognizing the need for proper development (World Tourism Organization, 2007, p. 88). Cultural tourism in the modern market is becoming the pillar in tourism industry considering that it serves as the strategy of growth for most destinations and used by the local people as a method of boosting the local cultures. In most cases, the destination managers use entrepreneurial strategies to enhance culture in tourism. The strategy involves putting emphasis on the high-profile facilities and events with an aim of catalyzing both the market and private developments, adoption of the built environments and economies for adequate competition with the growing industries, and construction of flagship cultural complexes and cultural events for urban developments. Strategic Alliances and Industry Partnerships Strategic alliance involves a joint development in which two or more business entities work together to share their resources and activities for pursuing common strategic objectives. These alliances are important to provide total experience to the visitors, working together instead of competing, enhance cost effectiveness and reduce the risks, and ensure realization of business opportunities (Kuglin & Hook, 2002, p. 218). Throughout the years, many businesses have using strategic alliance; however, the failure rates have been high. Many countries across the globe rely on tourism activities to enhance their economic growth. In addition, there are numerous opportunities associated with effective management of the destination that attracts tourists both the locals and the governments. As a result, there is need to focus on the public-private partnership (PPP) that involve both the public and private entities in managing various resources. Strategic alliance within the tourism industry is important in various ways. Various external factors that drive formation of alliances include turbulence within the world markets and high economic uncertainty, globalization of technology, shortening of the life cycles, existence of economies of scale for competitive cost-reducing agents, and increased investment requirements. Internal factors associated with strategic alliance within the tourism industry are a reduction of risk through sharing, shaping the market, learning the market trend and patterns from the other partner, and accessing the benefits of the other partnership especially the asset. SFA and SISOL are important tools ensuring that organizational strategic alliance deliver the needed objectives within the tourism industry. These tools ensure that tourism businesses have access to wider network of reaching businesses operating under the same industry, ensure that there is an easier transfer of products and services within the tourism industry, ground handling of the arrangements, and ensure that they share loyalty program incentives. To achieve these objectives, businesses need to consider partnership rather than networks and joint marketing. Based in increased level of diversification within the tourism industry, various sectors have emerged although their products and services are related. Effective strategic alliance often occurs when the businesses operate in similar industry. The stakeholders should be both the private and government entities. It is the aim of every business to grow and satisfy the needs of the customers. In destination management, the aim is to make a specified question attractive to the customers. Therefore, the concentration needs to be on both short-term and long-term since achievement of the objectives need adequate time. Tourism is a global industry that needs international cooperation among countries. Destination management needs to consider local, national, and international levels to ensure adequate satisfaction people across geographical domains. Strategic Control for Tourism Destinations Most organizational have challenges in measuring their success and implementing effective strategies that guarantee the future success. Most managers use different performance measurement systems and means of strategic implementation through Total Quality Management, balanced scorecard, and benchmarking. Tourism development has irreplaceable role in the regional policy across the states. This is due to its undeniable benefits associated with its development to the local population focusing on the social, economic, and environmental sphere. Tourism destinations tend to compete for visitors within the tourism market and subsequently reaching the sharp competitive struggle. In most cases, the aim of regional governments and institutions charged with the mandates of managing the destinations is to struggle in the struggle for the increased level of competitiveness within their destinations (Lusticky & Kincl, 2012, p. 105). Although benchmarking is not often used within the tourism sector, it is successful in delivery of service quality standards to the customers both locally and internationally. Quality self-evaluation within tourism industry is very important to ensure that businesses are able to identify and solve their problems. Systematic and regular analysis of the evaluation results might lead to various advantages including controlling the level of competitiveness in quality through benchmarking. In tourism industry, quality involves consistency in delivering the products and services that meet the required standards. The concept of quality is discussed widely in destination management. Increasingly, the customers are willing to pay more whenever businesses offer services that meet or exceed their level of expectations. The level of quality is important among the customers. Through creation of value for the customers, businesses are able to manage successfully their guests and retain them. For most consumers, reliability of quality services is important. To achieve this, the destination managers need to measure continuously the performance of various tourist destinations including the strengths and weaknesses within the same and different industry. There is also need to measure quality against the local and international quality grading systems through assessment of both primary and secondary data for the establishment purposes and improvement to acquire the required competitive advantage (Müller& Berger, 2012, p. 32). Quality management through benchmarking is linked closely to the concept of continuous improvement since it involves working to make something evolve, implemented within the reference frameworks, utilizes various tools and methods that involve repetition and evaluation. Benchmarking is people-focused management systems that aim to ensure continuous increase in the level of customer satisfactions while continually reducing the actual cost. Green Leadership Strategies Tourism has become an important economic activity. As a result, many countries have established various policies that protect tourist destinations. Despite having social, economic, and cultural benefits, tourism present both positive and negative environmental impacts. People are increasingly becoming environmentally conscious, which makes green leadership strategies important practices that should be considered in destination management. Some of the positive impacts of tourism include natural resources protection, efficiency in land use practices, displaying of various environmental practices, provision of the best model practices especially for waste management, increased environmental awareness, and environmentally responsible behaviours, and enhanced environmental leadership. Nonetheless, the negative impacts include environmental damages, pollution, heritage destruction, noise disturbance, and traffic congestions (Kapiki, 2012, p. 58). These negative impacts are likely to destroy destination attractive factors; therefore, there is need for green leadership management strategies to keep the levels of destruction normal. An effective strategic method is hard management that aims to regulate and restrict the activities of the visitors. In most cases, visitors are never environmentally conscious on practices that affect environmental conditions. Green leadership practices under hard management include enactment of both physical and regulatory methods. Through practices such as resource hardening, which involve the construction of a boardwalk, repairing of the heritage buildings and monuments would assist to attract more visitors and enhance the prevailing conditions of these facilities. There is also need restrict access and certain activities through implementation of rules and regulations that ensure both local and international visitors do not engage in activities that affect environmental conditions. Environmental impact assessment (EIA) needs to incorporate in destination management to assess the negative impacts associated tourism activities (Orsato, 2016, p. 181). other important management practices include resource-use management, waste management, water management, and recycling and non-chemical packaging processes to enable adequate facilitation of better environmental practices. As customers become more environmentally conscious, they are seeking for service and product providers that meet the required environmental quality standards. This is achieved through ensuring that visitors are more environmentally responsible, create an environmentally friendly atmosphere, and practice financial green leadership strategies. With economic management on environmental resources, there is a charge associated with commercial utilization of environmental resources. Such charges are often higher for tourism activities that impact the more the environment negatively with charges based on polluter pays principles. These activities would ensure that businesses effectively manage their resources especially the wastes to avoid paying much amount. Crisis and risk management and challenging issues Tourism is a crisis-prone industry and vulnerable to various factors globally leading to uncertainties that in most cases the managers powerless to deal with. Even though tourists are free to avoid various destinations associated with the risks, the consequences of the disastrous events seem to be incapable and to some extent might be profound. Globally, terrorism activities especially those targeting tourisms might be viewed as a disaster for the destination and ensuing events that could create serious tourism crisis. It has been witnessed in most countries as governments issue travel advisory, which in turn affect various businesses that rely on tourism activities. There are also tourist destinations that are vulnerable to political violence. Research argue that tourist destinations especially those considered vulnerable to violence motivated through political activities need to integrate crisis management planning into their strategic functions for sustainable development and management strategies (Evans & Elphick, 2005, p. 142). These management practices should aim at protecting and rebuilding the image of attractiveness and safety, reassuring the number of potential visitors of the destinations’ safety, reestablishing the attractiveness and functionality of the area, and aiding the tourism industrial members in their economic recovery. To ensure that destination management practices properly manage their risks and crisis, it is recommended to develop crisis management, establish crisis management taskforce, adequately partnering with law enforcement agencies, and developing a crisis management guidebook. Crisis in tourism industry decreases demand for various tourism products and services and contribute to economic shrinkage. With these negative impacts, the industry needs to be prepared to meet the demands of tourists through ensuring flexibility during crisis period. The visitors often make claims whenever the products and services offered do not meet their expected standards; as a result, the destinations that visitors perceive as less healthy will be quickly avoided. However, with the changing tourism patterns, it is becoming a great challenge for managers to develop crises management plans for tourism industry. The tastes and preferences of the customers are increasingly changing making it difficult to adjust their practices to meet the needs of the customers. Most destination management practices use risk management models to avert the negative impacts of crisis on the industries. Through establishing the context of the crisis, the managers are able to identify the scope and nature of the issue at hand, undertake risk analysis, and develop a risk portfolio. It is important to communicate the risk with involved parties to ensure that the management runs in similar page. However, the manager needs to understand the previous patterns of the crisis within the industry. References Campelo, A., Aitken, R., Thyne, M., & Gnoth, J. (2013). Sense of place: The importance for destination branding. Journal of Travel Research, 4(3), 201-215. Evans, N., & Elphick, S. (2005). Models of crisis management: an evaluation of their value for strategic planning in the international travel industry. International Journal of Tourism Research, 7(3), 135-150. Kapiki, S. T. (2012). Quality Management in Tourism and Hospitality: an Exploratory Study among Tourism Stakeholders. International Journal of Economic Practices and Theories, 2(2), 53-61. Kuglin, F. A., & Hook, J. (2002). Building, leading, and managing strategic alliances: How to work effectively and profitably with partner companies. New York: AMACOM. Lusticky, M., & Kincl, T. (2012). Tourism Destination Benchmarking: Evaluation and Selection of the Benchmarking Partners. Journal of Competitiveness, 4(1), 99-116. Müller, H., & Berger, P. (2012). Benchmarking for destination management organizations: the case of Swiss cities and Alpine destination management. Tourism Review, 67(4), 26-39. Orsato, R. (2016). Sustainability Strategies: When Does it Pay to be Green? London: Palgrave Macmillan UK. Qu, H., Kim, L. H., & Im, H. H. (2011). A model of destination branding: Integrating the concepts of the branding and destination image. Tourism Management, 32(3), 465-476. Verkuijlen, R. (2006). Destination Management. Breda: NHTV internationale hogeschool Breda. Wang, Y., & Pizam, A. (2011). Destination marketing and management: Theories and applications. Cambridge: CAB International. World Tourism Organization. (2007). A practical guide to tourism destination management. Madrid: Author. Read More