ENTER 2012 Research Track Slide Number 1

Differentiating a rural tourism website based on user´s travel

motivationsJuho Pesonen

Centre for Tourism Studies,

University of Eastern Finland

ENTER 2012 Research Track Slide Number 2

Agenda

• Introduction

– Problem

– Previous research

– Research questions

– Contribution

• Data and methods

• Results

ENTER 2012 Research Track Slide Number 3

Introduction• Importance of market segmentation research

in tourism– Plethora of studies and literature reviews– Different ways of doing segmentation research– Marketing management perspective

• Gap between segmentation theory and practice (Dibb & Simkin 2009)

• Segmentation important in website design (Perdue 2001)

ENTER 2012 Research Track Slide Number 4

Earlier research

• Both data driven and common sense segmentation in tourism

• Focus on finding segments• What it means to segment tourists in online

context? – Automatic data mining and analysis

• Measuring performance of segmentation results

ENTER 2012 Research Track Slide Number 5

Research questions• RQ1: What has been the impact of the Internet

and digital on the application and role of segmentation in tourism?

• RQ2: What kind of rural tourist segments can be found among rural tourists that use Internet to plan or book their holiday?

• RQ3: How reliable and valid motivation segmentation results are?

• RQ4: How can a website be differentiated to serve different segments and how effective the differentiation is?

ENTER 2012 Research Track Slide Number 6

Contribution

• Bridging the gap between segmentation theory and practice.

• Measuring segmentation effectiveness.• Measuring segmentation quality.

ENTER 2012 Research Track Slide Number 7

Data and methods

• Two surveys on the largest Finnish rural tourism website www.lomarengas.fi– Summer 2009, spring-summer 2011

• 727 and 1776 valid filled questionnaires• Segmentation based on travel motivations

– Large number of validating questions to examine difference between segments

ENTER 2012 Research Track Slide Number 8

Data and methods

• Cluster analysis• Discriminant analysis• Comparative analysis

ENTER 2012 Research Track Slide Number 9

The results

• Slight increase in segmentation studies and ICT in 21st century– Internet is just another information source

among others.– No performance measures using new tools such

as website log files.

• Four segments: Home region tourists, Wellbeing tourists, Family travellers, Social travellers

ENTER 2012 Research Track Slide Number 10

The results

• Segments exist but for example k-means cluster analysis fails to predict segment sizes.

• Very difficult to differentiate a accommodation search engine for different segments.– Performance unknown at this point.

ENTER 2012 Research Track Slide Number 11

Thank you!

• Juho.pesonen@uef.fi• Questions / comments?