E-tourism: Impact of Social Media Strategy on Turquoise Holidays

E-tourism

Contents
INTRODUCTION.....................................................................................................................................3
Literature Review......................................................................................................................................3
Current social media strategy of Turquoise Holidays..............................................................................3
Case Study Evaluation (Findings)............................................................................................................6
Discussion...................................................................................................................................................9
Developments of Social Media and mobile technology on Hospitality Businesses.................................9
New Social Media Strategy.....................................................................................................................10
CONCLUSION........................................................................................................................................12
REFERENCES........................................................................................................................................13

INTRODUCTION
E-tourism can be referred to as the analysis, design and application of information
technology as well as e-commerce within the hospitality and tourism industry. The use of
information technology has completely changed how the tourism industry operates. Customers
are now able to choose their destination of travel easily by comparing prices (Alcántara-Pilar and
et. al., 2017). If information and other communication technologies are used effectively, they can
prove to be highly innovative tools that can help organizations in upgrading their positions
within the market. There are different advantages of e-tourism like it allows tourism enterprises
to communicate with the customers more efficiently and also leads to an increase in the number
of reservations.
Organization chosen for this report is Turquoise Holidays, medium sized tourism
company that is based in London, United Kingdom. The company was founded in the year 2002
and provides travel packages to customers to different destinations across the world. The
company has been able to keep hold of its existing customers and attract new ones at the same
time by mainly focusing on the details of the services that they provide. It has a good social
media presence across various platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter and
Instagram. The report evaluates the developments of mobile technology as well as social media
on hospitality businesses. It also includes an evaluation of the company’s social media strategy
along with recommendations. Apart from this, the findings from the case as well as a new social
media strategy is also included in the report.
Literature Review
Current social media strategy of Turquoise Holidays
A social media strategy explains how an organization would use social media in order to
stay connected with its customers as well as achieve goals and objectives. It also explains the
different tools that the company would use in order to do so (Chen and Lin, 2018). In order to
build an effective social media strategy, it is important for an organization to make use of the
rights channels. Companies today have well defined social marketing goal of increasing its brand
presence in order to attract a greater number of potential customers. Currently, the companies
have a widespread social media presence across platforms like YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest,

Twitter and Facebook. They are able to engage customers and maintain a good position in the
market. They post regular updates about any new services or offers on different platforms in
order to keep the customers informed about the same. The current social media strategy of many
companies includes advertising through Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Pinterest.
This has proved to be beneficial for the companies as there has been an increase in the
overall sales as well as customer segment across the world. Besides this, the organizations also
use ads that are based on customer generated content. With the help of Facebook advertising,
tourism companies are able to generate leads as the level of engagement of users on this platform
is very high. In comparison to any other social media advertising platform, Facebook offers
much more advanced targeting (Chuang and et. al., 2017). The company does not run same
advertisements for a long period of time and instead keeps innovating them as the customers tend
to get bored of seeing the same content. When a new advertisement is developed, it is tested
within a small community in order to analyze its effectiveness. Although, the number of users on
Facebook is large, Instagram today is considered to be one of the major social advertising
platforms across the world. Advertising itself and its services through Instagram has helped
Turquoise Holidays in increasing its customer engagement rates.
Many companies post pictures and videos that are visually appealing to the customers
leading to an increase in the rate of engagement. Taking advantage of the various features of the
platform, they link the advertisements to the landing page of their website which allows the
customers to directly engage with the company. The main focus of the companies is on people
who are looking for either family holidays or once in a lifetime celebration. In order to attract
their attention, they post custom images of real people and offers various deals that are
irresistible for the customers and as a result lead to impulse buying. The companies ensure that
its services are innovative, fresh and not offered by none of their competitors in the market
(Kazandzhieva and Santana, 2019). Hashtags have recently gained a lot of popularity and the
respective company understands that the social media platform is driven by effective use of the
same. This is because hashtags serve to be one of the greatest ways for organizations to connect
with their niche market.
Being active on Instagram has resulted in more sales for the companies over the last few
years. Twitter advertising is another social media strategy that the organizations currently use.