Tourism marketing research.

An overview of marketing research in tourism is presented. The five most common types of tourism marketing research are as follows: determination of market characteristics; measurement of market potentials; market share analysis; sales analysis; and studies of tourism business trends. The marketing research process is found to involve seven steps: becoming familiar with the area and specific definition of the research problem; developing testable hypotheses; determining the specific information that is needed to test the hypotheses; developing the data collection instrument; acquiring the data; analysing the data; and establishing follow up procedures.