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June 11, 2007

Wake-up call | Vacation habits are changing, and the state's tourism industry needs to pay attention

By Harold Daniel
Director, the University of Maine System Center for Tourism Research and Outreach; associate professor of marketing, University of Maine, Orono

In Maine and elsewhere, tourists are changing. It's a fact of life accepted by most in the tourism industry. These days, tourists are influenced dramatically by cultural and technological shifts that affect everything from how they spend their vacation to how those vacations are planned and booked.

One of the important cultural elements that is influencing this behavior is the increasing preference for discretionary time over money. According to a number of sources, extracting the most value from one's time is becoming more important. Put simply, tourists increasingly are seeking their personal favorite vacation on each and every trip.

The second trend strongly affecting tourism behavior is the rapid advance of communication and transaction technology. These technological advancements are embodied in hospitality and travel websites like Orbitz, Priceline and Hotels.com. While people now value time over money, sites like these allow them to more thoroughly control how that time is used, reducing some of the uncertainty in travel ˆ— for example, uncertainty caused by fickle weather.

These trends have profound implications for Maine's tourism businesses, particularly the hospitality industry. Travel involves the delivery of experiences and services that can't be objectively evaluated before they're delivered because of their intangibility. But better technology can help make parts of the tourism and hospitality industries a little more tangible. Vacation shoppers can use the Internet to evaluate destinations, or check user comments to see how other people have rated a particular hotel, restaurant, attraction or destination, reducing the uncertainty of planning a vacation.

Meanwhile, time is becoming equal to many as the currency of tourism. One sure way to increase the value of the tourist experience is to increase the quality of customer service. This means training and empowering the staff of a tourism business to anticipate and address the needs of travelers.

Another way to enhance the tourism experience in Maine would be to control the weather. And while no one can do that, new technologies increase a traveler's agility in planning and taking a vacation, allowing some tourists to postpone or cancel a trip to Maine when crummy weather is in the forecast.

As a result, tourists in the future will probably book lodging later, at a time when the weather at the destination can be more reliably forecast. While Maine's tourism statistics aren't yet reflecting that sort of behavior, there are reports from some lodging establishments that an increasing portion of their business is being booked later, with less lead time. This will no doubt increase the difficulty of operating a lodging establishment as the predictability of that business erodes.

Another manifestation of these trends is the evolution toward more expensive vacations. As discretionary time becomes more valuable and tourists seek higher value for their time ˆ— for which they are willing to pay a premium ˆ— some attractions, lodging and dining facilities will be able to charge higher prices. For those in the hospitality industry, this means learning to more accurately anticipate the needs of the visitor and customize offerings to address those needs.

In the lodging industry, there is evidence nationally that higher-priced, more upscale offerings are more successful than down-scale, lower-priced offerings. The attempt to capitalize on this trend is becoming apparent in Maine with increasing numbers of upscale lodging and resort offerings under construction or in the planning stage. We also see iconic establishments from Maine's tourism past ˆ— like the sporting camp ˆ— having to evolve toward a higher value and higher priced product to survive. While there are additional cultural trends that have pressured the manager of the traditional sporting camp to alter their basic value proposition, it is clear that the days of truly rustic accommodations are mostly behind us.

Many of the more upscale tourism businesses in Maine are finding that they have under-priced their products. For upscale experiential products, price has often served as a signal of quality. This can create the unusual situation where lower price results in lower sales and vice versa, but only to a point.

These trends also increase the risk of operating a tourism business. Increasing expectations for upscale experiences go hand in hand with increasing demands for those experiences and an increasing intolerance of failure. Tourists are reacting more intensely to perceived failures, and that's likely to impact repeat visits or recommendations to other travelers. It takes only one public complaint on the Web to seriously damage a business.
For many in the state's tourism industry, the changing face of the tourism market has been a wake-up call. The challenge now is learning how best to respond to those changes. Given the increasing risks from more demanding Web-enabled travelers, enhancing the quality of customer service ˆ— as well as the quality of vacation experience delivered in the state ˆ— will have to become a high priority.

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