Essay on Dark Tourism and Tourism Organisation Response

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Essay

Question 1 - Choose one particular niche tourism segment and describe its development
over the last two decades. Discuss the ways in which tourism organisations respond to this
development critically by using relevant theoretical framework(s) and industry examples.
Niche tourism refers to forms of tourism that have emerged over the years and that mainly
focuses on the specific concept and topic. It is examined as one of the fastest growing tourism
that is tailored to meet with the needs of particular segment (Miles, 2014). Some of the location
with specific niche products is able to establish and position itself as niche tourism destination.
Dark tourism is one the segment of niche tourism that has been observed development over last
two decades. This tourism is defined as the tourism involving travel to historical places with
death and tragedy. The main attraction of the tourism is based on focussing on the historical
value rather than studying the stories of death and sufferings. There are five famous dark tourism
sites that are gaining popularity such as North Korea. It attracted mainly thousands of the
tourists in the late 1980s. Auschwitz-Birkenau that mainly attracted around 2 million visitors
from 1947 as the former Nazi death camp became the memorial. Another include 9/11
Memorial and Museum that is currently open in 2014 and is trying to attract visitors by
promoting the historical value. Rwanda shows the display of skulls of victims that attracted up
to a million people from 1994 (Stone, 2012). Chernobyl & Pripyat, Ukraine is one of the ghost
towns left as several tour businesses has planned to convince visitors to travel to such place.
It is being analysed that about 2.1 million of people visited the concentration camp at Auschwitz
in 2018 and mainly attracted more than 6.8 million visits in 2017. People are trying to focus on
the historical value of the dark places and are finding key interest to know knowledge about the
fascinated areas (Stone, 2013).
Tourism organisation has important functions to communicate with the tourist and promotion is
related with people to know to increase the knowledge level of the tourists. Development in dark
tourism is provided as many of the destinations are kept safe as the tourist can visit. Also guide
services are provided on cheap basis that helps tourist to know about the value associated with
the historical places. Tourism organisation provides the circle for providing the best services that
is concerned with accommodations, food, providing them guide, etc. In addition to this, special
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teams are being designed to maintain cleanliness at the place. Plans are created for development
in tourism and are implemented to enhance the footfall of the tourism (Biran and Hyde, 2013).
For example, World tourism organisation is mainly responsible for promoting sustainable and
universally acceptable tourism mainly in United Nations. This is mainly responsible for
designing plans and strategies that will lead to promote development in the tourism and mainly
focus is to provide the best possible services and satisfaction to the tourists. Most of the people in
the country are still not aware of the growing Dark tourism (Biran and Poria, 2012). For this,
tourism organisations play one of the important roles to provide knowledge about the spots. In
addition, some of the tourism agencies and other organisations must approach government to
change the existing policies as niche segment is observed to be one of the developing tourism.
Government need to provide more financial support to the organisations that would create plans
and programs for promoting the dark tourism of the countries.
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Question 3 - Describe the proliferation of social media globally and critically discuss the
role of social media in contemporary tourism marketing. Your discussion needs to be
supported with relevant studies and industry examples.
Social media is concerned with the use of websites and applications that enable users to create
and mainly connect with the activities of social networking. Proliferation is being used in the
Millions of people are using such platform for meeting with their different needs. It has also
helped many of the marketers to increase awareness, connect with customers and also increase
sales (Fotis et.al. 2012). Globally there are businesses that are the global tower of social
organisations that are considering themselves as social media networks. Some of them include
Twitter, Facebook, and Linked inn.
With development in technology and the use of internet, number of users has been increased that
are connecting with Internet and are trying to use different social networks. From 2010 to 2019,
social media users have been increased from 0.97 to 2.77 billion. With this, the graph is observed
to be increased that will reach to around 3.02 billion till 2021 (Social media users worldwide,
2018). It is believed that north, west, south Europe and also the North America has the highest
number of internet penetration between 88%-95%. The global increase in social media usage is
being increased by 9% (Sajid, 2016). Facebook is one of the greater social platforms that have
millions of the active users that meet with their different needs.
Social media is one of the growing platforms that has fundamentally changed the way in many of
the businesses are trying to communicate and attract the target market. In travel industry, rise of
Internet and popularity of social channels has enhanced travel marketing. The social media has
transformed the satisfaction of travellers as most of the travellers go online to research for the
future travel (Couldry, 2012). Booking by the travellers can be made through social media sites.
People are browsing Internet for the travel inspiration and validation from peers. With this, social
media has given rise to development in social sharing of the photos and videos taken on their
travels.
Organisations are essential to provide customer services and satisfaction that has enabled
customers to know about the brand. For example, airlines such as American airlines and Jet blue
are particularly adapting the method to take feedbacks from the customers and with this business
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are able to know issues associated in the business (Zeng and Gerritsen, 2014). With social media,
many of the travel agencies have been analysing to shift traditional methods with online
platform. Agencies have been providing facilities of self service booking that will facilitate
customers to have convenient booking. Social media have altered the landscape of marketing
mainly in tourism where travel plans are being designed based on reviews and social media
shares (Hays et.al. 2013). Positive reviews and customers are being attracted to purchase the
service with having positive experience.
Social media can serve as the social listening tool that will help tour operator to enhance brand
awareness and real guest feedback can be taken to take future actions regarding meeting
customer satisfaction. The business that will respond to complaints in sincere manner it will lead
to enhance the reputation among the potential customers. Complaints resolving is one of the
important tasks that will mainly lead to humanise the brand and indicate the future progress from
current customers. Millions of people are trying to connect each other through social media.
Tourism organisation under one platform with marketing can attract millions of the customers at
the same time (Lange-Faria and Elliot, 2012). For this, it is required for the organisation to use
social media as one of the important tools to increase their revenues and sales of the business.
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References
Books and journals
Question 1
 Biran, A. and Hyde, K.F., 2013. New perspectives on dark tourism. International Journal
of Culture, Tourism and Hospitality Research, 7(3), pp.191-198.
 Biran, A. and Poria, Y., 2012. Reconceptualising dark tourism. Contemporary tourist
experience: Concepts and consequences, pp.57-70.
 Miles, S., 2014. Battlefield sites as dark tourism attractions: An analysis of
experience. Journal of Heritage Tourism, 9(2), pp.134-147.
 Stone, P., 2013. Dark tourism scholarship: A critical review. International Journal of
Culture, Tourism and Hospitality Research, 7(3), pp.307-318.
 Stone, P.R., 2012. Dark tourism and significant other death: Towards a model of
mortality mediation. Annals of tourism research, 39(3), pp.1565-1587.
Question 3
 Couldry, N., 2012. Media, society, world: Social theory and digital media practice.
Polity.
 Fotis, J.N., Buhalis, D. and Rossides, N., 2012. Social media use and impact during the
holiday travel planning process (pp. 13-24). Springer-Verlag.
 Hays, S., Page, S.J. and Buhalis, D., 2013. Social media as a destination marketing tool:
its use by national tourism organisations. Current issues in Tourism, 16(3), pp.211-239.
 Lange-Faria, W. and Elliot, S., 2012. Understanding the role of social media in
destination marketing. Tourismos, 7(1).
 Sajid, S.I., 2016. Social media and its role in marketing.
 Zeng, B. and Gerritsen, R., 2014. What do we know about social media in tourism? A
review. Tourism management perspectives, 10, pp.27-36.
Online
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 Social media users worldwide, 2018 [Online] [Accessed through]
<https://www.statista.com/statistics/278414/number-of-worldwide-social-network-
users/> [Accessed on 5th June, 2019]
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