Structured essay on a comprehensive Marketing Plan to Promote YHA

Structured on a comprehensive Marketing Plan to Promote YHA Australia using UKs Back Packers as market target - Essay Example Cheaper flights and favourable exchange rates have encouraged the tremendous growth of this market with more than 400 000 backpackers expected to visit Australia in 2002. (Macbeth and Westerhausen, 2003) Backpackers hold special potential for regional Australia. Already, backpackers make up more than half of all international visitors and visitor nights in some parts of regional Australia. Their tendency to roam farther afield than other types of tourists is reflected in the fact that backpackers visited an average 10.6 regions in Australia during 1995-96, compared with 2.7 regions for all visitors. However although backpackers are visiting up to four times more of Australia than other types of tourists, large sections of regional Australia continue to be bypassed altogether The marketing strategy for backpacker tourism is composed of four strategies: promote 'quality' tourism based upon: maximizing income from tourism through a value-volume strategy (i.e. relatively lower growth in arrivals, but targeting higher-spending visitors); reducing seasonality; repositioning Australia's image as a destination, with greater emphasis on experiences linked to the island's environment and cultural heritage, marketing Australia's diverse population as a 'a mosaic of nature and culture, a whole, magical world concentrated in a small, warm and hospitable island in the Mediterranean at the crossroads of three continents, between West and East, that offers a multidimensional, high quality tourist experience. Tourism Australia has been active in this segment for a number of years, and is building on past experience to continue to develop it. Investing in this segment now will provide substantial returns in the future as the backpackers of today are likely to become the returning high-yield target markets of tomorrow. Backpackers area unique tourism segment. Their characteristics are as follows: there is an evident and strong social interaction among backpackers, the existence of backpacker enclaves, the relatively prolonged duration of most backpacker journeys compared to the conventional tourist trips), and the inviting traits of a classic anthropological subject, rites of passage. Parallel with the growth and expansion of the phenomenon itself, research into backpacker tourism has grown dramatically too, and a noteworthy share of that research has been conducted by means of ethnography, while a large share of the remainder display much influence from ethnographic methodology. The autho r has been part and parcel of this development as he, since 1990, in total has conducted more than two years of ethnographic fieldwork among backpackers and has published several papers on the ethnography of backpackers INTRODUCTION 'Travel and tourism is the largest industry in the world, accounting for 11.7 per cent of world GDP, 8 per cent of world export earnings, and 8 per cent of employment. This mobility affects almost everywhere, with the World Tourism Organization publishing tourism statistics for over 180 countries (WTO 2002). Almost no countries are not significant senders and receivers of visitors. Internationally there are over 700 million legal passenger arrivals each year (compared with 25 million in 1950) with a predicted 1 billion by