Planning Process-Demand and Supply

The question is asked what happens when supply is drag the demand.

You want to be in the situation where you know that people would come visit your destination,visit your attraction, and if you build all the facilities such as hotels attractions for the tourists and they don’t come, what’s going to happen from a financial perspective? Of course you are going to lose money, so be very careful to avoid the build and they will come to approach. If you build it and they come,fine. If you build and they don’t come, then you are going to be in trouble. When we refer to demand,what do we referring to? We need to understand as I’ve just shared with you.

We need to be demand and user-led not supply-led We need to undertake research of the users and what people like to do. So we are talking here in terms of why do they come when they come,what do they do, what are their preferences,what do they like what don’t they like. In addition to that you need to undertake a market feasibility study. And if people come,you got to find out how many people will come,how long will they stay. When we are talking about demand, we need to be prepared for the visitors, to provide facilities and services for them. We need to find out what type of facilities and services currently exist.

And if we get more visitors and tourists coming, what do we need to do? We may need to provide you know more facilities such as additional toilet, additional sitting in public areas, more trash cans for example. And then we’ll also talking terms of demand. We need to say is it up to standard and in particular is it up to international standard. You’ll never know that you know the majority of the time you know. when we consider users, we may be thinking about local users or new users from your own country.

But if you want to expand tourism like turn all knows, you know there is international interest or growing interests in your attraction or your destination, you want to make sure that it is up to international standard. We need to assess the feasibility of project

and we need to ask questions such as: Is it attractive to users and to the tourists? Is it sustainable and profitable particularly in terms of the numbers of people that you hope to visit your attraction or your destination?

So when we talk about demand considerations, we are talking what are they needs and motivations. Why do they want to come to visit you? What are their preferences?Right? Do visitors have a memorable and Wow experiences？Right? More importantly we want visitors and tourists to be satisfied， because if they are satisfied they will come again. If they cannot come again, then what will happen? They will recommend to friends and relatives and colleagues. Oh I went to such such a place,I visited this attraction if you have an opportunity you must go there. And what happened there is you know.

You want to establish loyalty, and having a satisfied tourist who will come back again, who will remand loyal to you, this lead to the automatic marketing, which is to have a brand in product and service. So when we talk about demand considerations, we need to know the type of visitors, is it independent or package traveler. We need to know why do they want to travel, why do they want to come to your destination and why in particularly do they want visit your attraction. We need to know who they are traveling with. Are they on their own? Are they with friends or are they with family?

We need to know the social and cultural background because it is important for us to understand what are their needs and how do they view things. Because for international tourists,their experiences and what they think,what they do may be very different to that of the local hosts. And we need also know how much knowledge and experience of the attraction or the place that visitors have. So that you will have an idea as to how much information we should share with them about your attraction. So that when they come and visit that they will understand what is going on and have some good background information about what the attraction they are visiting.

Let’s talk about supply, referring here to that of the resources, we need to assess the impacts on the community. If the impacts are positive, we want attract obviously maximize them. But if they are negative, our job as a planner is to avoid or minimize these negative impacts. The big problem we face in terms of supply and looking at the resource we knew commonly is the problem of over-use. Recently the Amsterdam city consultants talked about over tourism, too many tourists,too many souvenir stores. And they’ve recently introduced a new local regulation that there to be no more new souvenir stores in Amsterdam in order to prevent the problem of over-use. Crowding and congestion is also another big problem.

And this typically happens when we get too many tourists visiting the destination or there is too much mass tourism. And we need to understand we’ve crowds and we’ve congestion,we need to control it. And as mentioned here crowing congestion is basically a mass tourism problem, therefore it’s important for us to be able to manage and control our resources.