homson Holidays is the market leader in the UK inclusive holiday market, a position it has held since 1974. Thomson Holidays head office is in Luton but the majority of its 3000 employees work overseas. The company has about one third of the UK market and operates in a wide range of resorts offering a variety of holiday types to suit all ages and tastes. All products and brands share the same philosophy - to be Number One - providing customers with the best possible holiday for their money. ourism Destination Marketing Part 2 — Presentation Transcript * 1. Tourism Destination Marketing Part 2 * 2. Major Operations Assessing the current market(s) and forecasting future ones Auditing the destination and analysing its appeal to the markets Developing strategic objectives and a marketing mix Creating an organisation for implementing the objectives Carrying them out and evaluating the results * 3. Assessing markets Who are the visitors? Who will future visitors be? Why are they likely to come? What will they do? * 4. Research Counts of all individuals entering or leaving the country Interviews at frontiers with a sample of those entering and departing Self-completion questionnaires Sample surveys of population of a country Accommodation nights and arrivals recorded by individual accommodation providers * 5. Forecasting Exploratory forecasting: looking at past trends and projecting them into the future Speculative forecasting: qualitative approach, based on predictions made by informed experts Normative forecasting: tourism organisation sets targets eg. visitor numbers, expected revenue – then works out tactics to meet them Integrative forecasting: integrates the results from other forecasting methods * 6. Forecasting Forecasting is more art than science and cannot be relegated to a mechanical data-crunching activity. A forecaster needs to