Short of conducting a fulll-fledged survey, how can you keep tabs on how your tourism experience is being received by customers?

The simple question "Would you recommend us to a friend?" is often cited as being an easy to gather and powerful indicator of consumer satisfaction.  The question provides an important data point, but it's not a great diagnostic tool, especially in the tourism industry.  

If  consumers buy a can of soup but say they wouldn't recommend it to their friends, you can be pretty sure you have a product problem.  It's a comparatively one-dimensional experience.  But if consumers say they wouldn't recommend your travel experience to their friends, you're going to have to do some further digging to figure out where the problem lies - and it might not be with your "product."

At its core, reaction to a tourism experience is based on two factors: what you expect the experience to be and your enjoyment of the actual experience.

What consumers expect an experience to be is shaped by everything they've heard about your product and their experience (if any) with similar products.  Often, the image they've built up in their mind -- coloured by pop culture, history, the evening news and the opinions of friends and family -- may bear little resemblance to the reality of your product.  But to the consumer, if that image isn't matched by the actual experience, they may come away feeling your product was not "authentic."

Authenticity is a big topic in tourism circles and the real experts are elsewhere, but the important thing to remember is that "tourists don't visit the reality of a destination - they visit the stereotype that exists in their head."

If, for example, a tourist comes to Montreal expecting "Mountains, Mounties and Moose" they're likely to go home feeling they didn't have an "authentic" Canadian experience.  The reality of their visit didn't live up to their perception of the brand.

It's why consumers will rate a good experience at a two-star hotel better than an only average experience at a 5-star hotel.  The experience at the 5-star hotel may still have been better than that of the 2-star hotel, but the consumer's expectations prior to staying at the 5-star hotel were much higher.

Which brings us to the first of our two most important questions in evaluating a tourism experience:

• Was it what you expected?
  

It's that simple.  The experience you provided either met the consumer's expectations or it didn't.

The second most important question in evaluation a tourism experience is just as simple:

• Did you enjoy your experience?
  

Armed with only the answers to these two questions you can diagnose an awful lot about your marketing program and your product.

Here's how it works:

• Consumers will respond in one of four ways:
• The experience was what they expected and they enjoyed it;
• The experience was what they expected but they didn't enjoy it;
• The experience wasn't what they expected, and they didn't enjoy it; or
  
• The experience wasn't what they expected, but they enjoyed it anyway.
  

Take the percentage of consumers who fit into each group and create a chart that looks like this:


Now you've got your diagnostic tool.

If most of your customers fall into the top left quadrant (the experience was what they expected and they enjoyed it), you're in great shape.  Keep making improvements on what you're already doing to get more of your customers into the happy group.

If a large percentage of your customer fit into the lower right quadrant (wasn't what they expected and they didn't enjoy it), you've got a problem.  Your brand is making a promise that your product can't deliver (and by "brand" we mean whatever the consumer believed to be true about you and the category of business in which you operate).  You can either re-configure your marketing program to be true to your actual product or re-configure your product to be true to consumer expectations.  Take a look at what Wales is doing for a great example of the former.

If the bulk of your customers fall into the lower left quadrant (it wasn't what they expected, but they enjoyed it anyway), your product is probably fine but your brand isn't correctly positioned or at the very least is under-leveraged -- and you may be sitting on an untapped marketing goldmine.  These are the customers who have real potential to become advocates for your brand - the folks who will spread positive word of mouth - because they've been surprised by your experience in a positive way.

Customers who fall into the upper right quadrant (it was what they expected, but they didn't enjoy it) are the most difficult to figure out.  Your immediate reaction might be "if you knew what you were getting into, what's your problem?" but the answer probably lies in one of three areas:

• They may have been traveling with someone else who was attracted to your experience and only came along reluctantly;
• Your overall experience may have delivered on what they expected but one or two "moments of truth" let them down and negatively afftected their overall enjoyment; or
• They may have reluctantly picked you by default (e.g. yours was the last available hotel room or the restaurant they wanted to visit was closed).
  

Making a habit of asking these two simple questions won't solve all your challenges or give you all the answers, but in terms of providing an easy to administer and effective diagnostic tool, it's tough to beat.





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