Insights into how regional tourism operators view their markets

Abstract

Many researchers have considered segmentation in the tourism context and these efforts have enabled us to understand the bases that tourism destinations can use to segment markets and the bases that are more accurate predictors of future tourist behaviour. To date, all studies have used tourist data to profile the tourists travelling to a destination and most studies have used quantitative data. Addressing a key gap in the literature, this research sought to understand how tourist operators actually segment their market. Twelve tourism operators (activity operators, accommodation providers, destination marketing organisations and other stakeholders) were interviewed in one regional Australian tourism destination. Results indicated that different segmentation bases were used by different tourism operators. Activities sought, location, age, and trip purpose were the variables most frequently used by tourism operators to describe tourists. A tourist operator view is important because tourist operators can describe the tourists that are currently using their services. Given that different tourist operators attract different tourists, insights from these tourism operators can be compared with tourist data, thus enabling researchers to determine if they are adequately describing the tourists travelling to a destination.