How to Improve Tourism Experience during Tourism Planning Process?

Ok, the following question is about experience. So we are now in the area of massive tourism, we know whether a tourist has a good experience or not will influence a lot on their destination decision in the future. So in order to enhance the tourist experience, what should we do in the tourist planning process?

Thank you. Well, the first point to make is tourism experience now is instantaneous. I mean at one time, you send postcards to your friends. When you go to home, you spoke to your friends what you experience coming to China and they then spread the word around. But now with information technology, if you get a good experience, you tell people straight away. If you get a bad experience, you tell them straight away. So if you like that. Time is so important, because you make an instant judgment and that judgment goes on to the internet or social media, and you can’t really do very much about it. So the whole question of experience, I think is very important.

But let me make one caveat here. If you look at the tourism literature, people always link experience with satisfaction. And satisfaction means repeat business. This is not true. Could you find someone who came to China, had the most beautiful holiday, hundred percent satisfied, never come back , what we call explorers. They always want to go someone new. But clearly if you do give someone a good experience and they pass this on by word of mouth, by the internet, you know, things like trip advisor which we all consult now before we go anywhere.

and so I think myself, anyway that you know it still very important And this is why now in many marketing agencies, anyone involved in tourism really bypasses the whole system of going to the travel agent and saying, what did your customers think? No, it’s direct to a customer. And you know, sometimes the truth you get is harsh, otherwise it’s very, very good as well. and I mean some country, I don’t think it’s true not But something which is anecdotal. It’s always said about Japanese tourists come to the UK. They never complained. But they do complain when they went back to Japan if they were not satisfied.

So, you know, I think with the development of information technology, and particularly with its rapidity and widespread use you know that barriers between something going wrong in your destination and somebody else knowing about if as virtually disappeared. And I’m not a marketing expert, but I know that increasingly much, much more attention is given to actually talking to the customers and potential customers. Because this often tells you about things you think you’re doing well. But in fact, you are not.

I’d like to add to that what the question is really asking about is how do we create experience. And so that’s a production, it’s a process. And so if you think about creating an experience that is going to bring a person back or give a very good recommendation for others to visit. One of the things that you need to be very careful about is your carrying capacities, whether it’s a cultural product or whether it’s a natural heritage product or even and entertainment and urban product. It each has a certain physical capacity. It has a certain environmental capacity or ecological And it also has a perceptual capacity.

And if you fail to evaluate these in product development, then, you will deliver an experience that is deficient. So if there are too many people in a natural area, then that diminishes the value of the experience. And of course it has an impact on the ecology if it’s not managed well. So creating the destination product is to create that experience I think is very, very important. And you need to pay a lot of attention to making sure that the capacities are correct. Very difficult to do in China because I’ve been to places like Jiuzhaigou for example, on an October weekend and half a million people in the national park.

And it feels like you’re in the urban environment, you know, at an Olympics. So and obviously that is far too many people for a very narrow valley, an environment that is very special. So the challenge always is how to manage an accurate experience. I’m not saying you can’t have five hundred thousand people there, but it’s how do you manage them into a smaller quantum zone, and then move them through the experience. So they feel they get a sense of the wild and not a sense of crowding, which is what destroys the experience. I just wondering, I know you have a lot of practical experience like the real project tourism planning project.

So in such real project, do you have any specific process to collect the tourists response or there are specific requests for some tourism area? Yes. I mean, for example, if I recall correctly, we designed survey systems for most of the key attractions for example, Yunnan and also in the Sichuan, I know that not so much in Shandong and some of the other areas that I’ve worked, but the idea there was to obtain direct feedback. So for example, in the design of the systems to manage the flow of tourism and the experience, there was a market assessment of the existing visitors. What can be done? How do you feel about your experience? What are things that could be improved?

And then ongoing monitoring so that the managers for protected area, for example, can respond and adjust where there are problems. So you know, there are, for example, solution to the five hundred thousand people was not allow them to go in with their own location was to create a large parking station outside and then have an electric vehicles which have no diesel fumes, shuttle moving through the system, taking small groups at a time and dropping them off in so that you end up with a more distributed that a better experience, but then continue monitoring, asking visitors to give there to answer question is on their impressions to check on the things that maybe, that need to be addressed.

So that’s the kind of mechanisms that you put in as part of the results framework that you have to have I think for any kind of plan, especially when you’re dealing with structuring a kind of tourism experience.

Very briefly I don’t agree with that entirely. And I come back to the point of it earlier about information technology. It is no much easier to do this because you have computers, use algorithms. So you still have to ask the questions. But this can be process so much more quickly from a planning point of view, very valuable time saving. And absolutely. And in fact, this is, you know, we haven’t we talk about technology, but that’s the beauty of it today. If you go to most of the major heritage sites and the cultural natural resorts of China, they already fully online, they have web based information stands. You can use multi languages.

You can get all the information you need on the site. And you can answer the question again. So the whole thing is connected. You have the ability to generate immediate data, big data, fast and very relevant and take corrective action immediately in a way that has not been possible in the past. Technology and the internet help a lot.