Decision making by specialist luxury travel agents

Abstract

We report an ethnographic study of specialist travel agents in luxury wildlife tourism. Agents consider 30 factors in 5 groups, related to client, destination, attraction, operator and agent. They consider the groups in sequence rapidly and intuitively. They are driven by a powerful regard for the high expectations of wealthy clients, and a sense of responsibility to the clients, but they assume authority over the decision. They rely on personal experience with each particular place and tourism product, and sell only what they know. One of their skills is to project themselves into the client's perspective so as to imagine a trip in great detail. This process contrasts strongly with the explicit deterministic approach used by retail travel agents in high-volume lower-priced subsectors, where earnings are driven by commission and incentive structures. For high-end agents, establishing long term relationships of mutual trust with individual clients and tour operators is paramount.

Private conservation funding from wildlife tourism enterprises in sub-Saharan Africa: Conservation marketing beliefs and practices

“…The participants argue that tourists, rather than travel agents, ultimately decide which companies, camps and lodges they want to book: "we create a demand so the clients will go see their agents to obtain information about our product"; "it's the tourists that go to the agents"; "tourists already know where they want to go"; and ultimately, "if the PR is good 412 enough, no agent will be able to deflect a client". This view directly contradicts the view 413 expressed by expert specialist travel agents who book clients for these same tour operators 414 (Buckley & Mossaz, 2016). Those agents were adamant that they, rather than the individual 415 tourists, made the booking decisions.…”

“…They operate on public, private and communally owned lands, under leases, management contracts, profit-sharing, or equity-transfer arrangements (Grunewald et al, 2016;Mossaz et al, 2015). All of these approaches rely on a supply of tourists, especially 80 wealthy international tourists; and these tourists book their travel through commercial 81 systems, principally travel agents (Buckley & Mossaz, 2016).…”

“…Neither Buckley and Mossaz (2016), nor this study, interviewed individual tourists to seek 449 their opinions directly in regard to booking decisions and effective marketing. Whilst these 450 tourists can be identified once they become clients of specialist travel agents or guests of the 451 tour operators concerned, there are practical and ethical barriers to approaching them in either 452 circumstance.…”

中国户外旅游回顾与展望——基于外国学者视角①

“…Mechanisms for this may differ greatly between countries and cultures (Buckley et al, 2012, Buckley, de Vasconcellos Pegas, 2014. They also require an understanding of the internal structure and dynamics of the international tourism industry (Buckley et al, 2016), as well as the goals of conservation stakeholders (Romero Brito et al, in review). Exactly how adventure tourism and conservation can most successfully be linked within China is thus one key priority for research.…”

Aww: The Emotion of Perceiving Cuteness

“…As just one example not mentioned above, marketing materials for wildlife tourism products focus heavily on images of young animals which generate cute-emotion in potential purchasers (Buckley and Mossaz, 2016). Given the significance of cute-emotion in biology, society, and commerce, I propose that it deserves substantially greater attention in psychological research, building on existing studies cited here, and adopting all the methodological approaches used widely in studying other human emotions.…”