Introduction to Tourism Australia

Tourism Australia is the Australian Government agency which is responsible for attracting the international visitors to Australia in large numbers. The purpose for visiting Australia can be both leisure as well for business events. Through the website the agency draws the attention of the International audience, creates interest in them to visit Australia which further leads to desire in the target audience, eventually providing them to convert the desire into reality (Holder & Ruhanen, 2018). The agency at very present is active in 16 Key markets and some of its strategies to lure its target audience include advertising, media programs, trade shows, consumer promotions, online communication and consumer research(Divisekera & Nguyen, 2018) 

The underlying purpose of the assignment here is to identify the purpose and the web business model of Tourism Australia, understand its target audience and any consumer behaviour issues of the target market. Further in the report dynamic force in which the industry operates will be discussed and an analysis of the website using 7C, Webqual ease of navigation, attractiveness of the website and how it builds an electronic database will be studied. Hence, the report here will conduct a web audit of Tourism Australia. 

The website of Tourism Australia besides providing plethora of information about the scenic beauty, amazing beaches, wildlife and resorts also presents the audience with ideas to plan an event in Australia. The website is homogenously categorized in two separate section to target the different audience segment; Holiday in Australia for the leisure travellers and planning a business event for business travellers. The site provides in depth information and ideas on places to go in Australia, things to do, planning the trip to Australia and multiple offers for its target Audience. In short, the website is a one stop shop for people who are interested in visiting Australia either for leisure activities or for business purpose, the website provides comprehensive information and covers all the possible areas of focus while planning a trip(Tourism Australia, 2018). Some other clearly identified purpose of the website is:

• One to one marketing.
• Global reach-16 Key markets being tapped as of now for the promotion.
• Obtaining detailed information about the customers interested in Australia.
• Interactive and engaging campaigns.
• Round the clock marketing.
• Reaching right customers at a much lower cost than traditional marketing methods.
• Usage of multimedia content to engage the customers.
• Sharing of ideas with business and leisure travellers.
• Providing in depth knowledge for travel bloggers.

The website in short is a platform which makes people fall in love with Australia, to the extent that the country appears in their head while they are planning an international event, family holiday or leisure travel. Website Australia is an excellent platform to promote and advertise about Australia and highlight its USP to the international travellers.

Tourism Australia is a government agency which targets international visitors to increase the tourism in Australia. The business model is both G2C and G2B.

Purpose of the Assignment

Government to customer- The website targets individual customers directly and increase awareness about the things to do in Australia, which triggers the target audience to take some action with the provided information. The website targets the customers through the web 2.0 tools to trigger and simulate them to make a visit and enjoy the natural ecosystem of Australia.

Government to Business- The government agency directly targets corporate or government business or any other organization which is thinking of planning an event in Australia, or is looking to take the team abroad for team building exercise or any other business purposes.

The website of tourism Australia can be understood as Services-oriented Relationship- Building website.

Service-oriented relationship building website

The characteristics of the above mentioned websites are:

• Providing information to stimulate purchase and build relationships(Nielsen & Lund,2018)
• Products are not typically available for purchase online
• Information is provided through the usage of website, e-newsletters to inform the purchase decisions (Ternes & Strecker, 2018). 

Tourism Australia caters to all three of the elements in different ways. The website provides information on the places to visit, hotels, travel itinerary and many more to build a relationship of trust with the target audience and stimulate their brain to make a purchase. The products offered are not directly embedded in the website, however, there are certain links provided which directs the customers to partner vendor’s website to make a purchase. Information in abundance is provided through website and by subscribing to the monthly newsletter circulated by tourism Australia.

A target market can be understood as the market company wants to sell its products and services to and in includes a targeted set of customers towards whom the marketing efforts of the organization are directed(Iyer & Church, 2018).

Tourism Australia through its head office in Sydney and 7 other international hubs promotes Australia in 16 core markets, which are:

• America- USA, Canada & Brazil (Managed through Los Angeles Office)
• Europe- United Kingdom, Germany, France and Italy (Managed through the office in Frankfurt and London)
• Greater China- China and Hong Kong (Managed thorough offices in Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong)
• Japan & South Korea- Managed through office in Tokyo and Seoul.
• New Zealand
• South & South East Asia-Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and India

Building Personal Attributes into personas

Demographics

• Age 18-65
• Male/Female/Transgender
• Educated/working professionals/Employers/Corporate organizations

Psychographics

• Leisure travellers/Business travellers
• Ambitious/motivated/travel enthusiasts/achievers

Webographics

• Internet users/ Broadband/Mobile internet users.
• Digital media aficionados.
• Internet usage 4-5 Hours in a day.
• Social media users
• Travel sites, travel blogs, social media platforms, lifestyle websites

In the year 2012, tourism Australia conducted a research on how consumers view Australia and what motivates them to visit the country. Some of the major drivers for the Tourism industry in Australia were:

• Beautiful and clean beaches
• Amazing natural ecosystem
• Fantastic hotels and resorts
• Adventure activities
• Leisure and fun activities (Baum, 2018).
• Wildlife
• Festivals and carnivals (Nordli, 2018).
• Relatively cleaner air
• Signature experiences
• Fishing adventure
• Winery experience
• Discovering Aboriginal
• Aquatic and coastal experiences (Mahadevan, 2018).

Some of the major consumer behaviour issues of the target market can be:

• Racial abuse of Indians in some part of Australia.
• Discrimination of people on the basis of caste, colour, religion and ethnicity.

Internal Environment

Resource Analysis

Financial resources-Tourism Australia provides a good break-up of the costs of itineraries and helps in creating a trip.

Technology Infrastructure Resources-A great website along with the modern tools of digital marketing makes it highly competent in technology infrastructure.

Human Resource- Customer service support team is at a call or message away from the consumers, newsletters are also of great help.

Capability analysis

A fully functional and interactive website is a strong tool to attract the international visitors. Careful integration of the activities one can look to do in Australia provides a strong attention seeking point, the ability to identify the costs and plan the trip makes it extremely engaging and experience journey for the customers while being on the website.

Characteristics of Tourism Australia Website

7C of customer interface helps in creating an effective marketing program and enhances the customer experience through the usage of customer interface levels.

Customers- Business and leisure travellers from 16 Key markets.

Cost- Value for Money is provided through travel Australia.

Convenience- Extremely convenient for the interested people to consume more information and broaden their horizons.

Communication-Engaging communication through live chat and call support, mailing, social media platform and other tools of marketing to ensure two way communications.

Caring- Tourism Australia cares for its target audience by caring for their needs and giving them absolutely relevant information to make their journey and experience delightful.

Co-ordinated- Tourism Australia has a number of partners and vendors listed on the website to develop a co-ordinated strategy to help the customers.

Confirmation- The confirmation to the clients is through newsletter and mails.

Information quality-All the information provided on the website is provided by the government agency, thus highly accurate, appropriate and updated.

Functional Fit to Tasks-The website meets the information finding needs of the customers.

Tailored Communication-Personalized emails are used as a part of tailored communication.

Trust-The information seeked by the consumers is highly confidential and data protection act are followed thoroughly.

Response time-SLA for mail reply is 24 hours, calling and chat supports are instantaneous.

Ease of understanding- The content of the website is easily understandable with good usage of images to further enhance the customer experience.

Intuitive Operations- All the links on the website are active and easily accessible.

Visual Appeal- The site is neat, not loaded with too much information and engaging content on every page with plethora of information to consume.

Innovativeness- A number of industry insights, video blogs and testimonials are the innovativeness elements of the website.

Emotional Appeal-Consumers have a number of ways to engage with the content on the website, testimonials by customers gives it high emotional appeal.

Consistent image-Throughout the website, all the images put across a description are highly relevant and consistent.

Online completeness-Except for purchasing on the website, all other functions can be performed on the website.

Relative advantage-Tourism is better than other because of its comprehensiveness and government agency.

Customer service-Customer service support is available 24*7*365. 

Tourism Australia collects consumer data through a number of ways:

• Cookies
• Affiliate marketing
• Social media channels
• Contact form
• Engagement with the content
• Time spent on the website
• Newsletter subscription

Some activities of CRM include:

• Website and social media presence for customer development.
• Usage of email, newsletter and social media to up sell, cross sell and increase awareness.
• Mass customization of information.
• Data mining.
• Multichannel customer experience.

Benefits of using E-CRM

• Cost effective targeting.
• Reduced costs.
• Easy to create and deliver loyalty programs
• Improving the journey and experience of the customers
• Deeper customer understanding to provide better information to the customers

SWOT analysis is an internal environmental analysis which helps to identify the strength and weakness internal to the organization and focus on the opportunities and stay away from the threats which are external to the organization

Strength

• Key focus on the target markets.
• Regional offices in the target markets.
• Interactive and informative website
• Engaging content
• 24*7 customer support
• Accuracy of information
• Support to plan the trip or create an literary
• Visual depiction of experiences to enhance customer experience.
• Reduced costs
• Good combination of offline and online tools for selected targeting

Weakness

• In order to make a purchase the customer has to log on to different partner website, hence security concerns
• Unable to provide exact breakup of the individual experiences.

Opportunity

• Development of online tools makes the targeting easy.
• Data analytics can help in customer profiling, which can help in pushing more targeted content.
• Increase of VR and AI to enhance customer experience.
• Penetration and adoption of social media platforms
• Open platform

Threats

• Data theft
• Cyber attacks
• Increasing competition
• More channels for customer to consume information.

References

Baum, T. (2018). Sustainable human resource management as a driver in tourism policy and planning: a serious sin of omission?. Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 1-17.

Divisekera, S., & Nguyen, V. K. (2018). Determinants of innovation in tourism evidence from Australia. Tourism Management, 67, 157-167.

Holder, A., & Ruhanen, L. (2018). Exploring the market appeal of Indigenous tourism: A netnographic perspective. Journal of Vacation Marketing, 15, 26-42.

Iyer, V., & Church, N. (2018). The Linking Process: Product Life Cycle, Diffusion Process, Competitive Market structures and Nature of the Market. Red Internacional de Investigadores en Competitividad, 8(1).

Mahadevan, R. (2018). Examining domestic and international visits in Australia’s Aboriginal tourism. Tourism Economics, 24(1), 127-134.

Nielsen, C., & Lund, M. (2018). Building Scalable Business Models. MIT Sloan Management Review, 59(2), 65-69.

Nordli, A. J. (2018). Information use and working methods as drivers of innovation in tourism companies. Scandinavian Journal of Hospitality and Tourism, 18(2), 199-213.

Ternes, B., & Strecker, S. (2018). A web-based modeling tool for studying the learning of conceptual modeling. Modellierung 2018.

Tourism Australia, 2018. Market Regions. https://www.tourism.australia.com/en last retrieved on 22nd April 2018.