Do you ever put yourself in your potential visitors' shoes?

One of the lessons in services marketing I learned some years ago at MBA School is to put yourself in your potential customers' shoes. Tourism is a quintessential services industry and as such we must pay attention to the whole customer experience from the moment a potential client thinks about our destination, accommodation business or attraction (of course there is the issue of being on the radar in the first place, but that's a topic that gets covered quite a bit). What I want to do here is let you in on the process of putting together a holiday from the customer's perspective using my family as an example. The process begin with the decision to go to a particular place. It continues through the booking process, then the actual visit, the experience and the post-experience evaluation.

We have been hearing and reading a lot about how travelers are using the Web to research and book holidays. I and my wife are planning a holiday in BC next August and part of this vacation we want to spend in Tofino. Being a tourism professional, I could make some calls to people I know in BC to get recommendations about where to stay in Tofino, but instead I thought I would record the process as a learning excercise.

1. The decision. In our case the decision to visit Tofino was mine. My wife and I have family in BC who have been there and they have told us is worth visiting (word of mouth). I had done research about Tofino and the Pacific Rim National park for my Spanish language websites and I decided that the next time we visited my mother-in-law (she lives on Vancouver Island) we would visit Tofino (or I would go by myself).

2. Begin research. Word of mouth being the most powerful commercial you can have, we first looked at a place recommended by one of my wife's colleagues, Middle Beach (www.middlebeach.com) . The place looks fantastic and from its well designed website we could tell where it is in relation to Ucluelet and Tofino. Next we checked the rates. Not bad. So this is definitely a candidate. (My sister recommended the Seaferers B&B, http://www.seafarersbb.com/, but we have not considered B&B's because it's not what we like for this trip. We are traveling with a 13 year old and my mother-in-law and her husband will also join). But we never just settle for the first recommendation and priding myself in being a Web expert I began the Google search. We want to find a very beautiful spot with access to activities like kayaking (lessons), whale watching, space for jogging if possible (long beach) and good food. Time is of the essence because my wife found out that space at Middle Beach, for example, is limited for our dates (calling a travel agent does not even occur to us).

3. Googling. As for the majority of online searchers, my first stop is Google Canada. I type Tofino and select "pages from Canada." Results: 488,000. The first result is a sponsored link: Hello BC. I quickly browse the first two pages of results and decide to explore two or three sites whose titles seem to be helpful (Hello BC, Tofino.ca and Tourism Tofino). We'll see what happens.

4. Checking out some websites. I first visit Tofino.ca because it seems appropriate given the domain name. I quickly discard it when I see that it's probably a municipal website. So I go to HelloBC, www.hellobc.com (clicking on its Google Ad). I do a search of hotels: Long Beach Lodge Resort looks good. I go the resort's website (https://www.longbeachlodgeresort.com/) and begin exploring it. Trying to find rates. I figure out you have to click on reservations to look at rates. Once I get an idea of price I go back to the site to learn more about the resort and it's location. This is another candidate. The famous Wickaninnish Inn is also listed (and we had looked at it before, but it's not suitable for our family get together - this would be better if it was a couple's getaway and we were celebrating something special). Fickle as we online users may be, I decide to leave Hello BC and visit the Tourism Tofino site (www.tourismtofino.com)

To be continued...

Jaime

(PS. If you'd like to learn more about services marketing you don't need to go to MBA school - just get the book "Services Marketing" by Valarie A. Zeithaml and Mary Jo Bitner (McGraw-Hill Series in Marketing)