By Chris Lee

The tourism industry is in a competitive frenzy when it comes to social media and search marketing. According to a Memonic and YouGov survey earlier this year, two thirds of the UK’s online population (67 per cent) now using the Internet to research, source and plan their holidays, while just 15 per cent use travel agents.

Bournemouth University’s Professor Dimitrios Buhalis is an international specialist in tourism and technology. He is researching what he calls the “Service of Now" - the ability to obtain opinions and feedback from consumers in near real time through social and digital media.

Tourists report travel impressions and opinions through social media ‘on the go’. Therefore sharing live opinions is becoming progressively part of the tourist experiences, he argues. Social media monitoring provides a great tool for tourism and hospitality businesses to identify conversations about their brand in almost real-time.

NMK interviewed Professor Buhalis to learn more.

Briefly explain the concept of the ‘Service of Now’ and why it’s especially relevant to the tourism and hospitality industry.

The hospitality and tourism industry is changing fast and the pressure to compete for customers on a global scale is increasing constantly. At the same time consumers’ needs are changing quickly and their demands are getting more complex and sophisticated. Moreover, by embracing social media tools and real-time communication over the Internet consumers are more empowered than ever before. Hence, companies don’t have the luxury responding and adapting over long periods of time any more.

Valuable brands have to tackle this challenge. Success or failure of service offerings depends more and more on their agility, flexibility and the competitive speed at which they react to the dynamic needs of customers. This requires a real-time understanding and awareness of consumers’ preferences and needs. However, so far the design of new service offerings usually takes place long before the service is consumed. In essence, services are designed based on information about consumers’ wants and needs, which the hospitality or tourism service provider has identified at the time of creating the product.

Against this background social media is a catalyst of change. It increasingly enables companies to (1) retrieve background information about consumers (demographics, interests, consumption preferences) (2) to identify and monitor social media conversations among consumers (3) to engage with consumers in a conversation and to determine their geo-location; and all this in near real-time. Therefore, through monitoring social media, tourism and hospitality companies create a ‘nervous system’ that senses the dynamic changes in customers’ wants and needs in almost real-time. Hence, this information can be used by tourism and hospitality firms to proactively respond to these changes by creating flexible and agile services on the spot and by adapting service offerings instantly.

Additionally, such a nervous system has serious implications for identifying service failures as well as subsequent recovery. Studies have shown that 85-95 per cent of consumers don’t voice complaints about services to the company. Also, the ‘service recovery paradox’ tells us that customers, who have experienced a successful service recovery are on average more satisfied than consumers, who did not experience any service failure at all. Therefore, real-time enabled social media provides an opportunity to identify service failures and to recovery them proactively, hence leading towards higher customer satisfaction and service excellence.

What social media channels currently satisfy the Service of Now, aside from Twitter?

In general, all social media that is used by consumers to share live information, opinions and actions about ‘real-world’ events has implications for the Service of Now. Apart from Twitter and other micro-blogging services this includes Facebook status updates but also increasingly location-based services such as Foursquare, Facebook Places or Gowalla.

You say that this would be good for the tourism industry. Isn’t there a chance that the public will post in anger and later regret their post?

From a company perspective every feedback is better than no feedback. Like in pre-Internet times, it is ultimately up to the service provider to judge whether the feedback given by the customer is considered valuable, and hence whether actions will be taking (attempting to recover the cause of anger).

What about defamation?

The problem of litigation/defamation is attributable to the fact that by embracing social media tools in general, consumers are more empowered than ever before to share their opinions and reviews with a global audience. However, as the Service of Now represents a tool that enables companies to provide better and more relevant services - which in turn increases customer satisfaction - it will help brands to decrease the amount of unreasonably negative feedback and therefore have indirectly a positive impact on the problem of litigation and defamation.

How are tourism companies tuning into the Service of Now – what examples can you cite?

KLM recently used social media channels such as Foursquare, Facebook and Twitter to provide customers an unforgettable service delight. When someone checks in on Foursquare at one of KLM’s venues at Amsterdam Schipol Airport, their main hub, the airline’s KLM Surprise team goes to work. They do as much research as they can about the person using the information they’ve posted publicly on Twitter and Facebook and find a gift that’s customised to that particular customer. They then attempt to make contact with the person through social networks and other means to meet up with them to deliver the gift.

Different companies in hospitality and tourism use Twitter as a channel for identifying and recovering service failures. A prominent example is Omni Hotels, which is using Twitter to proactively engage with customers to provide better services and also to recover from service failures.