The practice of targeting visitors to urban destinations – a critical discussion of DMOs information strategies

Summary, in English

How do you attract visitors to your city? How do you manage to be visible in the information flow for potential visitors? Urban Destination Marketing Organisations (DMO) operate in a fast changing environment with ongoing challenges to face. Digitalisation is one of the issues that DMOs have to handle. As a result, we can see that many tourism offices are closed down in Sweden. However, has new technology entirely changed tourists’ information search, as is sometime suggested? In this paper, we discuss an ongoing project about how to target tourist information material to different tourists segments, and the value tourists inscribe to them. The project is carried out in collaboration with the DMO in the city of Helsingborg, which is an illustrative example of the issues above. The methods used are mapping of tourism information
strategies and materials, interviews with different members of staff at the DMO and visitor groups in Helsingborg. The interviews with visitors consist both of short interviews in the city and of in-depth interviews where we together with the respondents discuss examples of analogue and digital tourism information material. The project will contribute with enhanced knowledge about how tourist value information sources and possible tourist information strategies for urban DMOs.

• Author: Lena Eskilsson; Malin Zillinger; Maria Månsson
• Department/s: Faculty of Social Sciences; Department of Service Studies; Department of Strategic Communication
• Publishing year: 2018
• Language: English
• Document type: Conference paper: abstract
• Topic: Social Sciences Interdisciplinary
• Conference name: The 27th Nordic Symposium on Tourism and Hospitality. Tourism Implications and Dilemmas
• Conference date: 2018-09-24 - 2018-09-26
• Conference place: Alta, Norway
• Status: Published