Marketing approach to the tourist experience

Hospitality and tourism marketing is a continuous process by which an organization in hospitality and tourism industry creates, communicates and delivers values to customers that can satisfy both customers’ needs and the organization’s objectives. There are eight marketing strategy factors involved in the hospitality and tourism marketing environment; the traditional 4Ps of marketing mix plus an additional 4Ps. A marketing plan in the hospitality and tourism industry will include the following eight Ps: product, price, place, promotion, packaging, programming, people and partnership . The ultimate goal of the marketing plan is to create an experiential marketing experience effective enough to influence tourists’ behavior and create experiential benefits for tourists such as emotions and fantasies that they will remember for a long time. The product life cycle offers different strategies to be used in different stages of the life cycle. Hospitality and tourism organizations are not only managing expectations in the offering of a service/product but also promising experiences or destinations that the customers expect during their visit. The influence over potential tourists can be achieved by designing the correct experiential marketing stimuli. Customer behavior is influenced directly or indirectly by his/her imagery processing, which therefore affects a customer’s experience in the destination.