Tourism Research Links

Destination Positioning

[Prepared by Gillian MacDonald, UBC Graduate Student]

Gateway Sites

  1. Tourism Research Links http://www.waksberg.com/index.html. Rene Waksberg created this comprehensive gateway site with the tourism researcher in mind. It states directly on the home page that the site is not intended for travelers, but rather for the researcher specifically. The site is divided into three main categories: Research, Niche Marketing, and Technology. Within those three categories are hundreds of links to organizations which manage, consult, or research tourism, as well as tourism schools. This gateway is a perfect starting point for any individual interested in conducting research on the travel industry, or more specifically on destination marketing and positioning. It is somewhat tedious going through the numerous sites available in order to find the best ones, but having such high quality travel research sites all in one spot is indispensable. Additionally the site is maintained regularly so as to ensure that the links are as up to date as possible.
  2. Tom Rourke's Home Page http://hubcap.clemson.edu/~trourke/. Tom Rourke is a doctoral student majoring in tourism planning at Clemson University in South Carolina. He has put together a web site that is useful for the tourism researcher. Similar to Rene Waksberg's site, it provides links to numerous academic journals as well as to organizations which deal with tourism and research. Rourke's web site, however, is more user friendly and is significantly more aesthetically pleasing that Waksberg's site. Many of the web sites found on gateway site #1 are the same as those on gateway site #2, but there are enough differences between them to merit including both as gateways.
  3. The Christchurch Polytechnic Institute of Technology Library http://www.chchpoly.ac.nz/library. This web page is located on the Christchurch Polytechnic Institute of Technology's web site. On the library page of the web site is a category entitled "Resources by Subject". After clicking on that category, the "Commerce" heading will appear somewhere on the page with subheadings for "Hospitality", "Marketing" and "Travel & Tourism". All of these subheadings provide links to a variety of sources in their specific fields. Under the "Travel & Tourism" section, for example, there are links provided to a number of resources on the World Wide Web related to travel and tourism research. Some of the more important links with information concerning destination positioning are the Asia-Pacific Journal of Tourism Research, the Journal of Travel Research, as well as Eclipse 1, Eclipse 2 and ProQuest. ProQuest is a useful search engine for online ejournals.

Other Sites

  1. Alastair M. Morrison - Hospitality Consulting & Tourism Consulting, Tourism Marketing and Tourism Research http://www.omni.cc.purdue.edu/~alltson/Alastair.html. Alastair M. Morrison is a professor specializing in the areas of marketing and tourism with Purdue University's Restaurant, Hotel, Institutional and Tourism Management Department. He is also the director of Purdue Tourism and Hospitality Research Centre (PT&HRC). This particular web site is Morrison's own home page and is extremely useful as a starting point for researchers interested in learning the basics of destination positioning and marketing. The most impressive and useful aspect of this particular site are the extensive PowerPoint presentations (ppt) Morrison provides for each chapter of his books the Tourism System and Hospitality and Travel Marketing. These ppts provide a wealth of information concerning marketing and the travel industry, and include some fabulous sections on positioning. Morrison's web site further includes a section on suggestions for World Wide Web (www) site design and development for destination marketing organizations. The web site also provides links to 79 tourism, hospitality, and leisure journals, as well as a link to a web site dedicated to current indices and abstracts from various journals (http://www.bubl.ac.uk/journals). The site also provides a bibliography of 632 tourism, hospitality, and leisure books, as well as a bibliography of Morrison's articles and conference papers.
  2. North Carolina Tourism: Resources in Education and Development http://www.nctourismresources.net/index.htm. This site was designed to bring together many different types of information in order to assist communities in their tourism development efforts. Similar to Alistair M. Morrison's home page, this web site provides several useful PowerPoint presentations dealing specifically with tourism and destination marketing located in the Hospitality/Tourism Education section. The site also provides links to tourism journals as well as sites providing travel statistics.
  3. Indiana University http://www.indiana.edu/index.html. This web site provides a function that searches through 180,000 IU web pages. When the words destination, marketing are entered into the search function a number of useful documents appear. For example "The Pictorial Element of Destination Promotions in Tourist Destination Image Formation", "The Effect of Pull Factors Used to Influence Tourist Destination Choices on Retirement Destination Choices".
  4. International Centre of Studies on the Tourist Economy (CISET) http://helios.unive.it/~ciset/index.html. Established in 1991, CISET is an international centre of tourism economic studies, and is a member of the Business Council of the World Tourism Organization. CISET's mission is to carry out research and studies on tourism with particular emphasis on its national and international, regional and local, Italian and foreign economic aspects. The web site provides the researcher access to its publications, conferences and online documents. Of particular interest are the documents dealing with the Centre's research on tourism and hospitality management specifically one entitled From Destination to Destination Marketing Management. The Centre also offers its working papers to be sent free of charge to University libraries, teachers, researchers and consultants interested in tourism studies.
  5. Hotel Online - Where the Hospitality Industry Meets...Online http://www.hotel-online.com/Neo. This web site provides the latest and most relevant news, trends and discussion forums in the hospitality industry. The search function on this website provides access to numerous articles from various sources including academic journals and conferences. Entering the key words destination and positioning yields numerous results including "Positioning a Tourism Destination To Gain a Competitive Edge" from the Asia Pacific Journal. Numerous case studies also appear including "Positioning Sabah as an International Tourist Destination", presented at the Fourth International Conference "Tourism in Southeast Asia and Indo-China: Development, Marketing and Sustainability".
  6. Eclipse http://www.chchpoly.ac.nz/library/subject/eclipse1.pdf. The journal Eclipse is a destination marketing journal. Each issue covers a single theme in three sections, namely discussion, case study and research. Issue number one deals specifically with destination image, and thoroughly describes destination, image, perception, and positioning. It includes a case study on Japanese outbound travel, as well as a comprehensive section on "what the academics say" about the topic.