A tourism destination is a natural location with specific conditions and features that make it unique and valid for tourism. Visitors form a mental image, feelings, expectations, and opinions about the destination and spread the word about it through private conversations, as well as by digital media and advertising.
Communications in tourism represent a considerable part in providing the demand and supply side of tourism. Social media is a powerful tool for such purposes. It allows visitors to locate tourist sites and service s through diverse online platforms and monitor and react to already experienced visitors’ reviews and comments on services. According to such opinions and evaluations, future visitors form and change their behavior.
What Kind Of Sites Are Considered Attractive For Tourists?
First, to be considered as “touristic”, destinations need to possess political and legal confines for tourism and destination marketing. They also hold facilities and services that provide tourists with demanded services. Usually, such services are earlier planned and purchased by the visitors, who make decisions according to descriptions provided by destinations and other consumers’ reviews. In the case of an enjoyable experience, tourists experience emotional contempt, followed by word-of-mouth advertising and raised demands on the tourism product. Generally, potential customers face a large set of competing suppliers and a vast amount of information. As they are not able to analyze all of it, they are attracted to something different from other products. So if the destination develops a communications strategy that is based on social media, it will need to consider some features of successful online marketing strategies: novelty, adaptation to changing environment, involvement of famous and visually attractive people, uniqueness, the effect of surprise, and creative graphic design. All of these factors are important to consider for retail loss prevention in the tourism industry. Thus, a business’s chance for success increases when they offer specific products, create eye-catching advertisements, and reach as many people as possible. For this type of promotional boost, they might need additional help from outside sources. Websites such as Socialwick assist their customers in accessing the segmented public as further as possible and raising awareness about their brand, name, purpose, and services.
Social Media And Its Contribution To Tourist Businesses
As a result of globalization, visitors’ requirements have changed, making it essential for the business to make market analyses to stay competitive. For this purpose, it is utilized as the best tool for information sharing. It represents a digital marketing platform that makes tourism and travel booking practices simple and accessible. Moreover, businesses try to offer better services due to the informational availability as reviews spread rapidly and may damage their reputation. Thus, online data is one of the most important sources of information in marketing. Accordingly, destinations utilize social media for the following means: to encourage potential customers to visit their sites, to raise awareness of their services, to strengthen their reputation, to target new audiences, and increase the number of followers and fans on social media profiles.
How The COVID-19 Pandemic Changed Demand On Tourism
The indicated industry has suffered a lot as a result of the pandemic results. Health-related issues directly impact many businesses, especially those involving people moving from one to different places. As travel holds obvious health risks, many countries restrict access to their tourism destinations in accordance with World Health Organization (WHO) recommendations. And besides the official regulations, psychological and physical health risks and fear also affect public behavior and their decision-making process.
Information always affects customer behavior, and as they have unlimited access to it, they get data about the global pandemic as well, so redundant exposure of COVID-19 in social media can influence tourists’ perception of health-related risks. So, the market environment changed drastically, and businesses need to find new positioning strategies to adapt and develop different strategic plans that consider the unique widespread psychological drawbacks such as fear, attitude, and presumed risks. For example, to reduce the level of customers’ fear and anxiety during the pandemic, the industry needs to work out health and safety measures. And deliver the correct message by advertising that affects tourist’s attitudes so that the potential customers would consider tourism products safe, less risky, valuable, and attractive.
