Progress in Tourism Marketing

Book excerpt: The aim of this book are two-fold: (1) to evaluate the current progress of theoretical approaches to tourism marketing and (2) to show the ways to further develop the concept of tourism marketing for application within tourist destinations and individual businesses and evaluate its potential impact on performance improvement. The structure is based upon the inclusion of an introduction and four main parts, namely IT marketing, destination competitiveness, image measurement, and consumer behaviour. There is a brief introduction for each part prior to the discussion of specific chapters just to make the readers familiar with their content. The editors believe that there is a need for information on how to better apply both traditional and contemporary marketing tools in order to be more competitive within the international arena. Metin Kozak serves as an Associate Professor of Marketing in the School of Tourism and Hotel Management, Mugla University, Turkey. Also, he is a visiting fellow in the Department of Marketing, University of Namur, Belgium. Following a successful career within the last five years (since the approval of PhD degree in 2000), Metin has received two awards to mark his achievements. In 2001, his PhD dissertation on benchmarking was nominated, by the EFQM- EU, among the best three PhD studies on TQM. In 2004, by a committee of the Turkish Tourism Investors’ Association, he was awarded the grand prize of the tourism researcher of the year 2003 in Turkey. He has published mainly in tourism journals and authored a book on Destination Benchmarking. His main research interests focus on consumer behavior, benchmarking, competitiveness, cross-cultural research, destination management and marketing, and European tourist markets. Luisa Andreu is Assistant Professor of Marketing in the Department of Marketing, University of Valencia, Spain. She obtained her Master's degree in Tourism from the International Centre for Tourism, Bournemouth University, UK, and a Ph.D. in Business Administration from the University of Valencia, Spain. She is a member of the Spanish Association of Scientifics in Tourism. She has published various articles in Annals of Tourism Research, Tourism Management, European Journal of Marketing, Journal of Travel and Tourism Marketing, among others. She has presented papers at several conferences organized by the European Marketing Academy, Academy of Marketing Science, CPTHL, and State of the Art: Tourism. She has also involved in numerous academic and industrial projects. Her research interests include consumer behavior and cross-cultural issues in service marketing.