Travel & Tourism Research
July 2001
Tourism is a fast moving business sector influenced by a huge number of factors affecting each visitor’s individual choices about what to visit and where to stay. Any manager of a tourism facility or leisure service knows that the most carefully considered strategy can be overtaken by events or stories in the news that can quickly result in too many people or too few.
It is vital that managers understand what they are trying to manage by having up-to-date information on which to base decisions. The last decade has seen a shift towards smaller scale and more timely research at the grass roots in areas such as:
- Surveys of business performance across an area or sector: accommodation occupancy rates, 'how's business', to identify issues and trends.
- Site surveys for a particular facility, including hotel guest surveys, conference centres, exit surveys at visitor attractions.
- Surveys that compare the relative performance of different properties or attractions.
- Marketing campaign monitoring brochure impact surveys or Website evaluation.
It is therefore not surprising that a growing number of individuals and organization working in the tourism industry are turning to Snap Surveys to provide them with the kind of information they need to manage their work effectively.
Case Study 1: Snap a solution for all seasons at West Country Tourist Board
South West Tourism is the regional tourist board for the seven counties of South West England. With many popular destinations for holidaymakers, including Cornwall, Devon and the ‘English Riviera’ as well as world heritage city, Bath, the region welcomes millions of visitors annually
SWT use Snap across a range of activities that vary from season to season. In the summer, Snap is used for face-to-face visitor surveys around the entire region. Over the winter months, telephone surveys, carried out using Snap, monitor the effectiveness of brochures and other marketing initiatives. Having an in house survey facility like Snap means that a wide variety of surveys can be carried out at short notice. SWT process around 15 research projects in house each year. This represents around 4000 face-to-face interviews and 10,000 on the telephone.
"The key advantage of Snap is that it speeds up our data collection process. Projects tend to come along like buses, none for a while, then several at once..."
Nick Cooper, SWT's field manager of research, said: "The key advantage of Snap is that it speeds up our data collection process. Projects tend to come along like buses, none for a while, then several at once. So at times, you can be extremely busy. If you can create time to take on more projects, that clearly earns more money for us. Snap has paid for itself many times over on the telephone work alone."
Face-to-face surveys are produced in Snap on paper. Completed surveys are keyed directly into Snap.
"Inputting the data is very simple as well," Nick said. "It is easier than other packages I’ve used as it applies the routing of the questionnaire."
The biggest gain is on the telephone, where interviewers access the survey from a web browser, on the office intranet.
"We bought our interviewers headsets and now operate 20 phone lines. The time savings have been colossal and the accuracy improved by cutting out the coding and inputting."
Nick estimates time savings can run to a week or ten days per project, and comments that the management task is simplified as the data entry and handling of open-ended data is all automated.
As the foot and mouth crisis in 2001 started to take its toll on the tourism industry, SWT was able to react quickly to the changing situation through running a series of web surveys to track its impact.
The number of occasions SWT is able to use surveys on the web is also increasing. As the foot and mouth crisis in 2001 started to take its toll on the tourism industry, SWT was able to react quickly to the changing situation through running a series of web surveys to track its impact.
Nick commented: "Self completion on the web is much tighter and more accurate as a result of being able to build in the filtering process. It makes data collection much more accurate and simplifies the system for us.
"We would not want to go back to the old system now. It allows you to be cooler and calmer and get on with the rest of your everyday work!"
Case study 2: The Caravan Club rolls out improvements that offer something for everyone
Snap Survey Software boxThe Caravan Club is member association of 800,000 caravanners in the United Kingdom (RV owners, to our American readers). Founded in 1907, its annual revenues total £55 million. Principal among its services are two hundred high quality touring sites in locations throughout the British Isles for its members to use, some 70
With a £6 million development program earmarked each year for its network of sites, The Caravan Club wanted to ensure a good return on investment in revenue terms and create sites that would be popular with members. To better understand its members’ wishes, The Club carries out extensive surveys, including an annual site survey among a large sample of visitors to its 200 sites, administered and processed by Snap SurveyShop.
The Club is increasingly keen to recognize the diverse needs of smaller subgroups within its membership in common with much of the tourism industry. The research, therefore, has to help The Club identify subgroups in the responses. To do this, SurveyShop employs segmentation techniques at the analysis stage to identify the views of minority groups and highlight specialist interests.
John Parsons, The Caravan Club’s Head of PR explained: "The only way to do this is to ask real people, on site and use a large sample. And it is vital that the results will stand up by having the analysis done in a professional way."
Sampling is evenly spread around the network of sites and across the whole season. Some 70,000 questionnaires were despatched last year and a response rate of 30-35% was achieved. Surveys done at home typically enjoy a higher response John attributes this difference to people being in a holiday mood on site and therefore less motivated to fill in a form. It is still sufficient response to provide rich insight into what members want and their satisfaction with the facilities and services provided on site.
The survey has enabled The Club to address some contentious issues: members who want family-friendly sites and those who want to escape from the kids; those who expect to take their dogs with them and those who are not keen on dogs. As a direct result, The Club brought out a series of leaflets on choosing a site: one on families, one on dog owners and one on rural, peaceful sites.
John concluded: "Our members expect us to make informed decisions based on good quality research. Without proper, professionally done surveys you can’t always be sure you are achieving that. It is but a tiny proportion of the membership fees that goes to this activity but we think it is good value."
A double advantage with Snap
Snap brings a versatile solution to decision makers and managers in the leisure and tourism industry both by providing many different ways to collect data, then offering enormous flexibility in annualizing and interpreting the data
Snap brings a versatile solution to decision makers and managers in the leisure and tourism industry both by providing many different ways to collect data, then offering enormous flexibility in annualizing and interpreting the data. What is more, you can use the software yourself, as they do at South West Tourism, or, like the Caravan Club, get professional help from Snap SurveyShop.
Snap will help you to move beyond questionnaires on paper.
- CATI (computer assisted telephone interviewing) is ideal for the ‘winter’ surveys like South West Tourism’s brochure monitoring.
- Snap’s handheld PDA interviews are ideal for exit surveys or roving on-site surveys as they inexpensive and deliver clean data fast.
- Web surveys are perfect for Website evaluation or for sectors where there is widespread Internet usage, such as the business community. As South West Tourism is finding, they are very fast, reliable and virtually cost free.
- ‘Kiosk’ interviewing, where the respondent self-completes directly onto a securely mounted computer can yield excellent results from conferences, exhibitions and other large visitor events.
- If paper is still the best option, Snap’s automated scanning solution will help you to increase speed and accuracy while reducing cost.
Snap will then help you to develop a more in-depth and more sophisticated understanding of your data. You can:
- see topline figures instantly at the click of a mouse
- aggregate for the big picture, but then segment the data through cross-tabs and filters to identify and examine the smaller or specialist groups
- examine the influence of time of day, seasonality and events on your visitors
- work with either tables or charts and publish these easily in reports or on the web.
The fragmentation of the market and the recognition that visitors can no longer be treated as one homogeneous group is a significant driver in today’s tourism industry. Snap's ability to help The Caravan Club identify these important subgroups and understand them better enabled the club to develop the services it provides in a sophisticated way to benefit all of its customers.
Snap Surveys offers powerful analysis tools and services that will empower any organization to stay that vital step ahead, no matter how fast things are changing in the outside world