HAT304 Analysing Contemporary Issues in Hospitality and Tourism.

Tourism is usually travelling around various destinations in the world for pleasure.selfies are photographs that people take of themselves and share them using social media. Tourism selfie is whereby tourists take pictures of themselves and their tourist destination and tourists in Australia are now adapting to this type of tourism. According to (Aragon-Correa, J.A., Martin-Tapia, I. and de la Torre-Ruiz, J., 2015) tourist selfie usually introduces the taking of selfies as a new method of tourist looking. Even though tourism selfie has some benefits to both the tourists and the tourism industry, there have been some contemporary issues that have been identified by various scholars from Australia and around the world of how these issues are affecting the tourism and hospitality industry in Australia. These issues have been found to be evident in all the five traveler touch points involved. The scholars in their literature have come up with solutions of how this issues can be solved so that tourists may have the best tourism selfie experience.

Imagining involves a tourist company offering an advertisement of the best selfie spots in Australia such as the Sydney opera house and other attractive sites. They do this by using their social media pages; snapchat, Instagram, Twitter and many more. They can also do it by using their official website page. They post pictures of the destinations, or they ask tourists who have travelled to this destinations to give a review on their websites the making other tourists to want to move more to this destination (Rokka and Canniford, 2016). Contemporary issues in this stage include lack of convincing the consumer that the tourist destination is the best selfie spot and.lack of the best marketing option.

Adoption of the best marketing mechanisms will help handle the problems experienced at the dreaming stage .Good marketing will be able to appeal to the tourists that their tourist destination is the best. The tourist company can also try to learn the background of the tourism market, and with this, they will be able to find out the best travel destination. This will help the tour company to find out which sites are the best suited for customers to capture their selfie moments  thus preparing (Sheehan, Grant and Garavan,2018).

The second stage is planning which is usually the stage whereby the tourists will be trying to look for the best tourist destination in Australia. The tourist typically does this by visiting various tourism destinations website, social media services or contacting the customer care of different tourist destination that can catch the best Selfie moments. The tourist destinations should try to make their website to stand out from the rest to appeal to the customers that they will have the best tourism experience. The problem usually associated with this particular touch point is that some tourist destination usually over exaggerate the best selfie-taking spots. They do this by adding computer graphics and other photo editing graphics.Photo and video editing generally sends out a wrong message to the tourists. Once they visit this tourists destination, they find what the advertisement was promoting is not what they received in the actual tourist destination

There are various solutions that both the tourists and the tourist destinations should take to ensure that the planning stage is a success. They can do this by acting in good faith and making sure before they capture a video and upload it to the social websites that they have obtained it in the original form. Tourist destination often has the problem of lacking to appeal most to the tourists, even though your tourist selfie spot is the best there is in Australia you may face the challenge of requiring to appeal most the selfie destinations to the tourists on their website (Von Schumann et al., 2018). Hiring the best web designers will help you solve this issue. The importance of this is to make sure they have designed their website in the most appealing way to the tourists. The advantage of this is that it will make tourists want to visit your destination as they will want to experience their selfie moments as captured on the website

Once the tourists have seen the best tourist destination to visit and have already picked the best spot that will able to obtain his or her selfie moments they can now go the third touch point which is known as booking (Lyu, 2016). Booking is the stage whereby tourist accesses the tourist destination websites and arrange a hotel reservation. The prevailing trend in hospitality and tourism when it comes to booking is some of the sites are not easily searchable. Privacy is also a common problem whereby hackers can access the tourist account and obtain their information which is usually confidential.

Various scholars and tourism specialists have come up with solutions. These solutions help solve problems experienced at the booking stage. One of the resolutions that the tourist destination should always try to make their website easily accessible by the tourists. They can do this by allowing Google and other search engines that tourists use to access their website and index them .Indexing of the websites enables the tourists to access the website easily .once they type the name the website of the booking hotel appears. The process of booking thus becomes straightforward .Privacy options can also be implemented such as ensuring that before the tourists make their reservation, you make sure that they have an account with your hotel. A password or an encrypted code should protect that account. (Ladkin and Buhalis, 2016). The importance of this is that it will enable the tourist information to be protected and confidential. This solution thus ensures that the booking stage is a success.

The tourist has now made the booking reservation for his or her preferred destination and now it comes to the stage of experiencing .Experiencing is usually the stage whereby the tourist experiences their selfie moments in their Australian tourist destination of choice. Experiencing involves taking selfies with the various attractions or with their friends and family. The problem usually associated with this stage is the customer service delivered by the staff members. It is generally solved by hiring the staff with the best hospitality skills and ensuring that they know the historical background of the tourist destination (Highfield and Leaver, 2016). Staff who understand the historical context will help the tourists in making their experience more enjoyable as they capture the selfies .This is because they will  know information about those particular spots. The hospitality skills will help them to communicate with tourists and ensure that the tourists are receiving the best service possible. They should at times allow themselves to be captured in the selfies together with the tourists.

The last stage involved in the ultimate tourist experience is the sharing. The tourism selfie experience often is based on this as the purpose of the selfie to share your experiences with your friends. The problem associated with the sharing stage is tourists may fail to share their selfie moments. They often do this because the tourist's destination may have been unable to provide them with their best tourism experience (Erdem and Jiang, 2016). The tourist destination should always try to treat the tourist well with the high level of hospitality. These solutions should be applied effectively at all the five stages of the tourism selfie experience. The tourist that visit various selfie destinations in Australia will have the best selfie moments once these solutions are applied. According to some google scholars, every tourist destination in Australia should, therefore, use all of this measures effectively to allow tourist to have the best selfie moment experience.

References

Aragon-Correa, J.A., Martin-Tapia, I. and de la Torre-Ruiz, J., 2015. Sustainability issues and hospitality and tourism firms' strategies: Analytical review and future directions. International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, 27(3), pp.498-522.

Erdem, M. and Jiang, L., 2016. An overview of hotel revenue management research and emerging key patterns in the third millennium. Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Technology, 7(3), pp.300-312.

Highfield, T. and Leaver, T., 2016. Instagrammatics and digital methods: studying visual social media, from selfies and GIFs to memes and emoji. Communication Research and Practice, 2(1), pp.47-62.

Ladkin, A. and Buhalis, D., 2016. Online and social media recruitment: Hospitality employer and prospective employee considerations. International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, 28(2), pp.327-345.

Lyu, S.O., 2016. Travel selfies on social media as objectified self-presentation. Tourism Management, 54, pp.185-195.

Rokka, J. and Canniford, R., 2016. Heterotopian selfies: how social media destabilises brand assemblages. European Journal of Marketing, 50(9/10), pp.1789-1813.

Sheehan, M., Grant, K. and Garavan, T., 2018. Strategic talent management: A macro and microanalysis of current issues in hospitality and tourism. Worldwide Hospitality and Tourism Themes, 10(1), pp.28-41.

Von Schumann, J., Barros, L.S., Dias, R.S. and Andrade, E.B., 2018. From slum tourism to smiley selfies: The role of social identity strength in the consumption of morally ambiguous experiences. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 28(2), pp.192-210.