What is it about?
This paper creates a Tourism Marketing Knowledge Grid and uses it as a framework for the review. The grid reveals that extant tourism marketing research has primarily focused on how service promises are made and kept, and has mostly generated frameworks to improve managerial decision making or provided insights about associations between constructs. Strategic principles, underpinned by the understanding of cause-effect relationships, are rare. These findings point to exciting opportunities for future research, including increased attention on enabling promises made to tourists and development of strategic and research principles; increased use of experimental, quasi-experimental and longitudinal research designs, as well as unstructured qualitative designs; and an increased focus on the study of actual behavior.
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Why is it important?
It is important to know which kinds of tourism marketing knowledge we need to generate in future. This article is a roadmap that can help researchers in proactively designing their research to close critical knowledge gaps.
Perspectives
I personally have become quite frustrated with survey research. No matter how hard I work to design a good questionnaire, I still always have doubts if what people say is of much relevant to how they behave. Field experiments are obviously much harder work, but to me personally it is much more rewarding if I can draw conclusions from my research which are causal and actually relate to behaviour. I also feel more comfortable making recommendations to industry based on such findings.
Professor Sara Dolnicar
University of Queensland
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Tourism marketing research: Past, present and future, Annals of Tourism Research, July 2014, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.1016/j.annals.2014.03.008.
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