Abstract

Tourist attractions appreciate the importance of innovation in their attraction, products and services to entice visitors to attend. Therefore, initiatives to examine areas where attractions could innovate to improve and enhance the visitors’ experience are welcomed. A way of doing this is to seek to understand their specific customer journey, as this could be considered vital for getting an increased insight into opportunities for increased experience for the visitor in exchange for their currency. Using the customer journey model, there may be an opportunity of starting building the relationship with their guests much earlier than presently. An untapped area is where a relationship could start is from the time the visitor purchases a ticket in advance electronically to the time they arrive at the location. This area is called 'inter-services' and can be implemented in any customer journey model. There is an opportunity for attractions and consumers to build trust and a relationship with each other during this stage. Both parties would get the maximum opportunities of increased engagement, experiences and increased transactions which may not necessarily have taken place previously.
The aim of my dissertation was to find out tourist attractions’ views regarding ‘inter-services’ and if it is an important area for attractions to concentrate on when starting to build trust and relationships with their visitors in advance. This was done by interviewing senior figures from five high-profile London attractions to find out their views regarding this area. Each attraction interviewed is from a different area of the tourist attraction spectrum, from museums to concert halls, which will give a general overview of what the current situation is regarding this idea of ‘inter-services’. Interacting with dedicated tourism groups on LinkedIn also gave an overview of what the tourism industry feels about this area. A number of different themes were explored such as technology, social media, human resources and marketing. The majority of attractions interviewed were aware of this area, however, all attractions currently had a very basic element of this in place. Overall the ‘inter-services’ in the tourist industry is in an infancy stage. Development depends on
‘INTER-SERVICES’ - Copyright © 2014 Carlton Gajadhar 4
finance and a willingness to experiment with technology as a key factor in delivering this sort of service.