Use of Tourism Distribution Channels and Marketing Segmentation Strategies

Tourism destination organizations and individual businesses often find themselves making decisions concerning the development and distribution of their products, without having a full understanding of how the channel operators perceive and react to these strategic actions. If the proper distribution channels are developed, they can go a long way towards determining the patterns of destination use, penetrating target markets, and creating economic impact, as it is important to have an awareness of, and access to, effective distribution intermediaries. The specific objectives of this study were to compare the importance that international and domestic tourists attribute to various forms of information, both at tourism destinations and in the pre-trip context, and to carry out an analysis of their information sourcing behaviour, based on internal and external information sources, including the use of the Internet.