Digital marketing practices: trends and challenges for the tourism industry

Abstract

The tourism industry has been facing a tremendous change in services due to the fast developing digital and smart applications in technology. The tourism industry is one of the first service industries to adapt and use information and communication technologies (ICT) for promoting its services (Sadr, 2013). In the early stage of the mainframe age in 1950s, flight booking systems went online from traditional manual booking system and in early 2000s, the advance of web-based technologies led to the emergence of e-Tourism (Kasahara, Iiyama, & Minoh, 2017). Nevertheless, the tourism services still experience very relevant changes (Baggio & Del Chiappa, 2014), due to the unprecedented development of ICTs in recent decades (Neuts, Romao, Nijkamp, & van Leeuwen, 2013). These changes and developments in technology has also created a new marketing era as “digital marketing”. Digital marketing has changed the traditional marketing mentality as well as consumer perception; consumers are accepted as “co-creators” and new terms as “crowdsourcing” has emerged. Digital marketing concentrates on the use of “data” coming from the customers or potential customers. Social media creates “data” coming from the potential customers. Services are promoted by the use of mobile applications and customers are active users of information. Information access is faster and possible through different digital channels. Augmented Reality, QR codes, artificial intelligence provides more and faster access to services and information. New technologies like near field communication (NFC), radio frequency identification (RFID) and unstructured supplementary service data (USSD) provide a faster and convenient form of payment for customers. Tourists acquire a more personal, faster and accurate tourism experience starting from their reservation. There has been a great change in the “promotion” side of marketing as a result of social media and direct e-mailing. Tourism products differ and customers have a greater variety and more alternatives which they can compare and decide in seconds. This research puts forward the trends and challenges for digital marketing for the tourism industry.