TOURISM DEVELOPMENT HANDBOOK

A Practical Approach to Planning and Marketing, Kerry Godfrey and Jackie Clarke

The book I decided to read for Inno58h was The Tourism Development Handbook written by Kerry Godfrey and Jackie Clarke. I knew absolutely nothing about the book before borrowing it, but it was recommended for me by a friend. After reading the back of the book, I chose it because it seemed interesting and I thought that it could benefit me by giving me a good overall look in the industry that our client Kustavin Kipinä works in – tourism.

Even though the book is written thirteen years ago it still seemed really relevant while I was reading it. The way to improve tourism in development area is not just about offering everything to every potential customer, or copying the ideas from those places that have great number of tourist arrivals. Every destination that wants to develop their tourism needs to find their own attractions and make a careful and detailed plan on how to meet the goals that they set for themselves in the development plan for the destination.

There are truly many aspects on how to make your destination attracting for those who have never visited there before. Like I said earlier you can’t just offer everything to everyone, you need to segment your potential customers and try to focus on how to get those tourists interested in your destination. The way to choosing your segment group is not just picking those tourists that have most money to spend, but picking those customers whose interest in the destination has more pros than cons overall. Sometimes you even have to use unorthodox ways such as demarketing to ensure that your destination area is valued by those that come to visit your location.

The key elements of the book include organization and development objectives; aspects of supply and demand; marketing; customer care; and monitoring and evaluation. Sustainability is and should be most critical factor in long term tourism. There are long term goals that can be met only by careful planning and all time evaluation of the tourism in the area.

Tourist destination should also always keep self-updated on the global trends of tourism, since they tend to change every now and then. What’s popular now might not be popular anymore in five years. Tourism is industry which is really sensitive to economic fluctuations, so you can never know for sure what’s going to happen in future. Because of that tourism should never be main industry of the destination area. It should rather be in more supportive and complementary role.

I believe that The Tourism Development Handbook gave me a lot better overall view on the whole industry and I’m sure that it will help me and my team in the task that we are yet to be received in Kunstenniemi. :) I would like to recommend this book to everyone interested in tourism, since it gives really much information of the industry that is rapidly expanding whole time.

-Marko