Emerging needs in tourism demand : a critical perspective

Based on the fact that the most of the contributions of tourism marketing literature and of major tour operators’ strategies tend to be focused indeed on an ex-post process of demand’s segmentation, from customers’ feedbacks about the preferences granted to different types of offer’s settings (destination, location, accomodations, and so on), this leads in the companies to the prevalence of a sales’ orientation rather than marketing one. The purpose of the paper is to demonstrate that a proper application of analysis methodologies to advance the requirements of demand is able to detect currently unmet needs and new customers’ profiles. These aspects are even more critical in a context characterized by a more and more aware, skilled and sophisticated demand, a state of economic recession, and therefore by an increasing competition between firms. In this regard, it was used initially two focus groups, involving as many target differentiated by age, integrated by laddering method and psychodynamic approaches, such as “picture language”. Subsequently, quantitative survey was conducted through a questionnaire administered to 150 individuals to verify the significance of the results of previous phase. Among the main findings, it appears as the holiday is seen actually as a primary need - related to the main dimensions of values’ system of the individual (affectivity and love; health and wellness) whose perceived value is also steadily increased in recent years. There are also many relevant aspects that emerged on the benefits sought, an expression of emerging needs with respect to vacation in the strict sense (holiday as a synonym for personal growth) and tourist services offered by different actors (personally consulting, flexibility and customization in the design but together with a competitive price). More specifically, research has allowed the identification of clusters and/or chains of tourism needs concerning "what" and "how" the consumers desire to enjoy the tourism product, allowing the researchers to draw new profiles, contrary to what is commonly thought absolutely cut across all socio-demographic characteristics. In this sense, the study will then be deepened and strengthened through the use of additional statistical methods such as factor analysis and other similar methods