IFITT Talk in “Customer Engagement & Big Data in Tourism”

The IFITT^Talk was very successfully organised on the 8th of September 2016 at the University of South Australia. The IFITT^Talk was well attended attracting more than 100 participants including tourism researchers and students, tourism professionals, representative of tourism associations, bodies, South Australia City Councils and tourism attractions. Marianna Sigala (Professor of Tourism, Director of Centre for Tourism and Leisure Management, School of Management, University of South Australia) and Prof Marie Wilson (PVC, Business & Law, UniSA Business School, University of South Australia) opened the proceedings of the workshop with a welcome talk and brief of the importance of tourism research for UniSA and South Australia. 

 

– International Federation for Information Technology and Travel & Tourism (IFITT)

– School of Management, UniSA Business School, University of South Australia

– Centre for Tourism and Leisure Management, School of Management, UniSA Business School, University of South Australia

– School of Information Technology and Mathematical Sciences, University of South Australia

 

IFITT^Talk was structured into two major sessions each one featuring four presentations and a discussion panel provided by leading authorities and experts in their field. The first session of the workshop focused on the issue of Customer Engagement in the tourism industry. All four presenters stressed the importance to support, empower and boost online engagement of travellers, as the later can lead to increased customer loyalty, satisfaction and button line business results. Online customer engagement is critical, since data of online participation show that the majority of travelers are passive instead of active creators, distributors and discussants of online content. The session started with a presentation titled Social Media Analytics: Tools for Exploring Social Media Engagement Behaviour by Dr Jodie Conduit (University of Adelaide) and Dr Rebecca Dolan (University of Auckland, NZ). The presenters analysed a scale to measure the online social media engagement of people using Facebook profiles of wineries. The presentation also provided evidence that Facebook posts by wineries that attract higher online social media engagement by online users are those that: include entertainment features; and less than four pieces of information. More information per Facebook post lead to less online social media engagement, due to its information workload and limited cognitive capacity of the users. The second presentation titled The bright and the dark side of Customer Engagement: cases and implications in tourism and hospitality was given by Professor Marianna Sigala, (School of Management, University of South Australia). Prof Sigala provided an overview of customer engagement strategies that tourism firms can embed into their business value chain for converting customers and ‘exploiting’ their intelligence and co-creation abilities into co-designers, co-marketers, co-producers and even co-partners/entrepreneurs. Several best practices from the tourism industry were identified, and a series of guidelines on how to develop successful customer engagement strategies were given including the use of: customer motivation / rewards; gamification; humor / entertainment elements; customer engagement measurement strategy and metrics. Finally, the dark side of customer engagement was also discussed, as positive customer participation in value creation should not be taken for granted. The major customer value co-destruction online engagement activities were discussed and strategies to deter them were presented. Rebecca White (Tourism School, South Australia) gave the third presentation titled The Art of Turning Social Spectators into Customers. Rebecca provided numerous examples and practical suggestions on how tourism firms can convert their online customers from passive viewers of online content to active marketers, brand ambassadors and distributors of online content. Siggi Frede  (Strategy and Marketing Consultant, Effektiver, and Lecturer at ICHM – International College of Hotel Management’, South Australia) gave the forth presentation titled Customer Engagement in Tourism. Siggi identified and presented numerous best practices from the tourism and hospitality industry showing how and why firms need to provide and design engagement opportunities aiming to provide customer support and services during the whole tourist journey, i.e. before, during and after the trip. A feedback mechanism monitoring business results should also be used to inform and re-design and continuous improvement of customer enjoyment strategies. 

 

The second session of the IFITT^Talk  focused on Big Data in the tourism industry, a very topical and critical issue that when exploited appropriately it can differentiate tourism firms from competitors, and lead to great customer satisfaction and business results. The first presentation was given by Professor Andy Koronios, (School of Information Technology and Mathematical Sciences, University of South Australia) and it was titled Big Data in Tourism: Challenges & Opportunities. Prof Koronios gave an overview analysis of the four characteristics of big data (namely volume, variety, veracity and velocity) and discussed the challenges but also benefits of big data analytics. The second presentation titled An Introduction to Programmatic Commerce- How Big Data Changes Customer Communication was given by Dr Nico Neumann (Institute for Choice, University of South Australia) who gave numerous examples from the tourism industry showing how leaders in the firm manage to increase revenues, customer targeting, understanding and satisfaction by big data analytics. The third presentation titled Associations and causations in data was provided by Dr Jiuyong Li (School of Information Technology and Mathematical Sciences, University of South Australia) who talked about the dangers of conducting associations tests amongst variables without having a rational and theoretical underpinning to explain their causality. Example illustrating the interpretation risks of associations and causation data analyses were provided. The last presentation titled Using big data to improve tourism experiences was given by Dr Eva Balan-Vnuk and Sheldon Jones (Microsoft Education Team, Microsoft – South Australia), who analysed numerous examples on how intelligent technologies including Artificial intelligence, virtual reality and mobile applications can be used to improve tourism experiences and services. 

 

IFITT^Talk  resumed with a wine and canape reception allowing time and opportunities of its participants to network and further debate the critical issues presented during the workshop. 

 

The workshop finished with the announcement of the date of the next IFITT^Talk meeting, i.e. the 9th of November for an IFITT^Talk on two topics: “The Sharing Economy in tourism” and “Advances and disruptive models in electronic commerce in tourism” 

 

 

Photo caption: Marianna Sigala, Professor of Tourism, Director of Centre for Tourism and Leisure Management, School of Management, University of South Australia