Glossary of Terms


Appreciative Inquiry	An approach to engaging conversations that encourage imagination, innovation and flexibility with stakeholder groups, and builds on the positive attributes that already exist.
Clusters	Businesses that benefit from working together to create and market tourism experiences that meet the needs of niche markets.
Community Tourism Partnerships	A relationship where local partners engage and learn about each others’ products, services, and mandates. Collaboratively, they explore, develop, and innovate ways for travellers to experience their community’s rich culture, art, nature, and cuisine offerings. Retail, service, and government sectors establish positive relationships to offer visitor experiences that are packaged and marketed adding new business opportunities and new revenues to the community.
Customer Lifecycle	The creation and delivery of value to the customer at every touch point in the engagement cycle; in tourism this means from they time they decide to travel, to the time they are at home telling stories and sharing photos.
Custom Market	Tailoring a tourism product or experience to the specific needs of an individual customer. Generally practiced by companies whose products are very expensive or unique, and who have significant specific information on their customer to design and deliver ‘what they want, when they want, where they want it and with whom!’
Customer Experience	A blend of an organization’s physical performance, the senses stimulated and emotions evoked, each intuitively measured against customer expectations across all moments of contact.
Customer Experience Management	The processes used by a company to track, oversee and organize every interaction between a customer and the organization throughout the customer lifecycle. The goal is to optimize interactions and all touch-points, from the customer's perspective, to foster customer loyalty.
E-marketing	Electronic marketing, using the Internet and other forms of electronic communications to communicate in the most cost-effective ways with target markets.
Emotional Marketing	Getting your target audience to connect with your product, service, and brand at a very basic and fundamental level; emotionally.
Enabler	An enabler, in the context of tourism, is a general term used to describe all the businesses and organizations that support the development and promotion of tourism. They enable growth, market reach, development, advocacy and celebration. Examples include: Destination marketing organizations, government and municipal departments with a tourism mandate, economic development, chambers of commerce, etc.
Experience Broker	An individual who acts as an intermediary between experience providers and guests in the unique role of identifying market opportunities; determining and aligning the needs of the customer. They then coach and mentor local area, non-traditional experience providers so that they may deliver a high quality experiences for a fee, aligned with guest expectations. Experience brokers facilitate custom, specialty, and niche market experiences; they are able to identify and create the personal enhancements and quality delivery standards to set the stage for memorable guest experiences.
Experience Economy	A five-tiered economic framework that defines experiences as a distinct economic offer, one that creates a specific atmosphere that engages the customer in memorable ways. A *commodity* business charges for undifferentiated products. A *goods* business charges for distinctive, tangible things. A *service* business charges for activities you perform. An *experience business* charges for the feeling the customers get by engaging with it. A *transformation business* charges for the benefit of customers (or “guests”) receive by spending time there.
Experiential Marketing	A holistic approach to customer relations and branding that focuses on making an emotional and physical connection with the customer, rather than merely describing features and benefits.
Experience Providers	Individuals, companies or organizations that create holistic travel opportunities by sequencing and staging activities, personal encounters, and authentic experiences that are designed to create long-lasting memories and customer loyalty. Experience providers consciously create memorable activities by staging a theme, harmonizing positive cues and eliminating negative ones, mixing in memorabilia and engaging all five senses.
Experiential Travel	Engages visitors in a series of memorable travel activities, revealed over time, that are inherently personal, engage the senses, and make connections on an emotional, physical, spiritual, social, or intellectual level.
Major Market Segment	A large market of travellers identifiable as having particular customers with specific buying characteristics (e.g. family, business, festivals, motor-coach).
Mass Market	The un-segmented market in which tourism products and services are available, positioned and sold to any traveller (e.g. museum admissions, airline tickets, cruise), or large geographic regions (e.g. USA, Germany).
Niche Market	A business focus on a small, defined part of a larger market that has a need for a product or service that is not being addressed by mainstream providers. Common to small businesses aiming to differentiate themselves. Companies succeed by narrowly defining a group of potential customers and serving them well (e.g. Girls Getaway Weekends, Weddings, Spa seekers).
Operator	The term ‘operator’ for the purposes of industry training refers to all business that operate a tourism entity that directly services travellers. It is a broader reference than the traditional ‘tour operator’ or ‘receptive operator’ and includes everyone such hoteliers, attractions, restaurants, transportation, outfitters, wilderness operators, etc.
QR Code	QR is an abbreviation for Quick Response code. These original two dimensional bar codes have become the standard code for mobile tagging which enables quick hyperlinking over 3G or Wifi, linking real world objects to Internet data by using a camera function on a mobile device. Some bar code reader apps can read multiple formats of Quick Response tags, other tagging systems such as Microsoft Tags use dedicated apps.
Search Engine	A website that allows the visitor to complete a search for web pages containing words that are of interest. Common search engines include Google, Yahoo, Lycos, Bing and AltaVista.
Service Economy	Services represent a diverse group of intangible economic activities such as restaurants, hotels, shoe-shining, physiotherapy, computer repair, a home inspection before buying a house ... and the list goes on!
Social Media	Social media are works of user-created video, audio, text or multimedia that are published and shared in a social environment, such as a blog, social networking site, photo or video hosting site.
Social Media Optimization	A term used to describe the conscious choice by businesses to examine, select, and optimize the various current and emergent social media opportunities as part of their marketing strategy. It also includes ‘where’ you will reach out to customers, be that via the Internet, your website, or a handheld device with an application.
Social Networking	The interaction between a group of people who share a common interest. Using websites such as Facebook and Twitter to network and share information and media. Individuals and businesses can use social networks to further customer relationships and extend the customer life cycle.
Sustainable Travel	Fosters appreciation and stewardship of natural, cultural, and historic resources, and special places by local residents, the tourism industry, government, and visitors. It is tourism that is viable over the long term because it results in a net benefit for the social, economic, natural, and cultural environments of the area in which it takes place.
Tourism	Is defined as: “The activities of persons traveling to and staying in places outside their usual environment for not more than one consecutive year for leisure, business and other purposes.” Source: The World Tourism Organization.
Visitor Experience	A visitor experience is something that is personally encountered, lived through, and affects the individual. It may involve observation or participation; be active or passive, planned, opportunistic, personal or shared.