• Marketing

Marketing

This report assesses opportunities and challenges to marketing sustainable tourism. It sheds light on the barriers that prevent demand and supply for sustainable tourism services from meeting and examines the role that tourism distribution channels could play in strengthening the demand/supply link for sustainable tourism products.

As the report highlights, quite often these products are the result of a well thought sustainability concept, and yet the entrepreneurs behind it fail to reach the marketplace, because they lack marketing expertise and knowledge of the tourism industry’s distribution channels. In particular small firms from developing countries, suffer from poor targeting, market segmentation and positioning, low consumer product knowledge, and consumer risk perception.

The report highlights that:

• distribution channels are key to increase the exposure of sustainable suppliers, and to capitalise on the latent market demand for sustainability by changing behaviour in non-sustainable firms
• few channels have high equity, but many of them offer a good cost-benefit ratio, hence efforts are needed to provide opportunities for businesses
• policies should encourage industry associations and individual distribution channels to introduce sustainability criteria for their suppliers
• a stepped approach could first introduce criteria where eco-savings can be made, and where sustainability is part of the quality evident to the client, as well as customer education
• destination management organisations and tourist boards are useful to create destination brands and can act as sales portals
• certification schemes are increasingly setting standards for tourism firms and providing guidance, but their implementation is not widespread and with low equity and low consumer recognition they are a tool for business to business lobbying
• internet retailing has the potential to reach a broader market but for the inexperienced tourism firm much training is needed, with priorities such as managing risk perception of consumers if operating their own website, to possibly paying high commissions for discounted last minute travel sites.

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