LM SIG Webinar - Insights from Tourism Management for Community Leisure Management
Well, welcome to the World Leisure Organizations' Leisure Management Special Interest Group webinar. The Leisure Management SIG was established several years ago and was one of our initiatives to provide information to our members and the leisure sector. Today's webinar is about the lessons we can learn from how commercial tourism services assess their performance. Please note that we're recording the webinar today so we can make the YouTube video available in the coming weeks.
So let me start by... Initially, I want to introduce some of the faces and voices you'll hear. Jo An Zimmerman is running things in the background for us, and she's the co-chair of the Leisure Management Special Interest Group. Antonio Bremante is a member of the World Leisure Organization Board and an active collaborator with Jo An and me as we organize the leisure management activities. Our special guest today are Leonardo Fortes and Joe Pavelka. I'll provide a proper introduction in a minute.
And I am John Tower. I'm the Co-Chair of the Leisure Management Special Interest Group and an honorary fellow at Victoria University in Melbourne, Australia. Before we get started, it's a custom in Australia to pay respect to the traditional owners of the land. I respectfully acknowledge the traditional owners of this land. I'm on Wurundjeri land in the Kulin Nation.
I value the culture, relationships to country, kinship, connections, and journeys of the first peoples of this land. I pay respect to the traditional elders, past, present, and emerging. Always was, always will be, Aboriginal land. I also pay respect to the traditional owners of the lands where you may be. So we have the chat function for anyone in the session to share comments or questions.
We've asked you to please provide a short introduction of yourself so everyone knows who's participating in the webinar. I'm pleased to note that we have registrations from North America, Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Australia for today's webinar. But I know many are in time zones that hinder their attendance.
Jo An will monitor the chat. The format for this session today is around a 20 minute to 25 minute conversation with our guests, followed by your comments and questions via the chat. I'd like to welcome Leonardo Fortes to the Leisure Management Webinar. Leonardo is from Brazil and has over 18 years of experience in the leisure travel and tourism market with experience in airlines, international events, digital commerce, and theme parks.
He has worked in the areas of customer service, quality management, performance and process management, improvement projects, and currently sales and marketing. He has a bachelor degree in leisure and tourism and an MBA in business management from the University of São Paulo, with a specialization in strategic management and international marketing. We'll be hearing from Leonardo in a moment to get his insights about commercial tourism assessments. Our second guest is Dr. Joe Pavelka from Canada. Attentive readers of the World Leisure Journal may recall Joe's contribution to the special edition on Leisure Manage about eight years ago. Joe has three decades of experience in leisure, tourism, parks, and community development.
His work involves grassroots developments of the largest outdoor skate park in the world to numerous recreation and tourism development projects. His scholarship focuses on lifestyle migration, tourism crowding, and the intersection of tourism and recreation. Joe is a professor of Ecotourism and outdoor leadership at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Canada.
So the aim of today's webinar is to explore lessons from commercial tourism management that can be applied in community leisure management practices. Before we get Leonardo's insights, I want to ask Jo An to explain how we got to this focus to help set some context and explain why we're running the webinar on this topic. Jo An? Okay.
Well, traditionally, we get together, John and Antonio and myself, get together and brainstorm ideas. And last semester, I was preparing a finance management class for my master students. One of the things in the reading was about how hotels manage their capacity and how they know if they have to do more marketing, or are we going to lower the price to get more people in, and what do we have to do to manage that, to get in the amount of money we need each day to meet our financial objectives.
I reached all over my contact list in the United States and around, and nobody knows how to And none of the software programs that I investigated made it possible either. So we thought, why not ask some people with more experience? So here we are. Okay. So I guess that sets the scene for you, Leonardo.
Can you please share some of the metrics you've used in your commercial tourism responsibilities? Sure. First of all, thank you. Thank you for the invitation. I'm glad to be here today, sharing with you guys a little bit of my knowledge.
When you're talking about metrics in commercial tourism, I would say there are a bunch of them. Just to highlight a little some of them that I've been working with. As you mentioned, Dr. John, I work for different industries into tourism, from airlines to theme parks. Each of them has different kinds of metrics and KPIs that we monitor.
Some of them are similars, others don't. For example, nowadays at theme parks, we monitor length of stay, visitation numbers, sales units, or sales revenue when you're talking just about the amount of money that each visitor brings to the park. Or for example, when you're talking about training, we monitor or the number of training people. For example, for another numbers, we have when we are talking about digital media campaigns, for example.
We could say about views or clicks, impressions, engagement, cost per click, and that's it. Also, there's another metric that I consider that they are universal. When you are talking about, for example, satisfaction, satisfaction levels from guests or users, or even recommendation levels, or by intention. Just to bring some examples of metrics that we could consider. You've operated in a few different environments, airports and airlines, and you're currently working in theme parks. Have you noticed differences in how they measure, assess their performance in these different settings like events or theme parks? There are some core differences, considering the type of metrics or numbers, could you say, or KPIs.
When you are considering, for example, events or theme parks or even airlines. Also, there are some difference when we consider the tools that are used to analyze the data. Each company has different tools. But when we are talking about the metrics, for example, for events, we can consider the number of guests in that event or the amount of spend in that event or the amount of time that guests stay in that event, that one-day event or two-day event. When we're talking about theme parks, we could consider waiting line times or length of stay, because length of stay, when you're considering days, consider, for example, the destination of Orlando, length of stay is a very important number to consider because that will impact directly the number of parks that that visitor will visit. That's a very important number.
It's similar when you consider the length of stay or the length of enough time that the guest is staying in an event. They are similar KPIs, but you have different views on it. I would say maybe we could consider have more similarities. Sorry about my English.
Similarities when we are talking about data analysis, then differences. Okay. And please don't apologize about your English because it's so much better than anything I could ever do in Portuguese. So you're getting along fine. So can you comment on the impact of how some performance assessment strategies that were generated from some of the metrics that you've got? Can you share with us a type of case study of something that you picked up on, and then this led to a particular change in strategy? Sure, definitely.
First of all, it's important to mention that without data analysis, you don't have management. Same when you're talking about research, we need data analysis to find some answers. I brought two cases here that I think it's very interesting. One of it, I'm working on it for the past two years, analyzing the number of visitors.
I work in a company that we manage four parks in Florida, Orlando and Tampa. After COVID, we noticed a drop on Brazilian visitors, about 60%, 6-0, in one of our parks. The first analysis on numbers, it's understand that 60% of Brazilian visitors are not coming into that specific park. When we compare to other parks, the number of Brazilians visiting their parks are very close to the pre-COVID levels, different from this specific one. With that, we understood that we do have an issue regarding this park. After that, we started analyzing, and we made some research and also analyze an extra numbers to understand what could be the problems, where the problems would be.
Then we understood that length of stay is one of the reasons people are staying Last days in Orlando, and then the first part they are cutting, it was this specific one. Another reason, for example, we analyzed the numbers of car rentals that Brazilians are having in Florida in general, and that also made us think that also that could be a problem because people were not renting so many cars as it used to be. Do it to the high cost of a car rental nowadays after COVID.
Many other reasons we found analyzing the numbers. We made also research, and in this market research, with the numbers we got, we understood also we have some awareness concerns regarding this specific park against the competition. Then we made a instead of case, considering it. With that analysis, we built a project, a rampout project, considering increase the efforts on marketing and to try to get more brand awareness into that product. Also, we are trying to get more budget, more money from the company to invest on communication and marketing for this park, specifically. Also, we could understand and build a new product.
We We built a new ticket, considering this park and all the other ones, because normally we sell tickets for these parks in combos, not only in one park, but more than one. We built a new model of combo, considering this park and another ones, that we understand that fits more with the environment today, post-COVID, than the ones that we had and work it very well pre-COVID. That's what we are testing now. We launched in July this new ticket, this new ticket offer. We are boosting all the communication regarding this new ticket and also regarding the park, trying to increase the number of Brazilians visiting Vinci dias.
Then for the previous numbers that I got, this offer start July first. Then considering the first month, the whole July month, we got a 30% increase on sales for these parks comparing to last year. We understood that we are achieving our target.
So if we want just one month offering the new product, we got 30% more than last year. It's a very good result for Just one addendo here. Always when you're talking about data analysis and metrics, we need to consider that we need to analyze it, comparing with another number. For example, compare with last year, comparing with last quarter or with last month. We say year over year, month over month, quarter over quarter. Because if you If you don't have anything to compare with, you cannot analyze that and understand if it is increasing or decreasing or improving or not.
That's an important thing. I don't want to extend more. I have another example here, but that's a very good case that I'm just working on it right now. We're considering analysis of numbers and metrics and building a project and running it, and we got good in just one month. Well, I hope your management understand that a 30% increase is pretty incredible.
You must be doing something right with that. Well done on that. Let's bring Joe into the conversation. Joe, you work in more of a broader section. I refer to it as the intersection of Tourism and recreation.
So I was wondering if you could share some of your insights about that interconnection. I I know you've got some slides, so please let me know if and when you want me to shift to any of the slides that you want to refer to. Sure. Thank you. I find this to be a fascinating question, and I think Jo An's point about looking around for metrics that support yield management in recreation and not really being able to find a lot.
I think that that's really interesting and very important. I I've been working in this for a long time, and I'll just tell you a very quick story. But, John, maybe put up the first slide.
Okay. Will you carry on, and I'll get technology to catch up. Okay, great. It was interesting because many,
many years ago in the 1990s, I worked at a city, a very large city that has a lot of public recreation facilities and our budget was cut by 22 %. Thank you. That's perfect. Our budget was cut by 22 % in one year. 22 % is really a time of reinvention You can't really tweak minus 22%. So it thrust us and me into this world where I really started to understand the difference between these two parameters Parameters up here. Revenue reliant operations and non-revenue reliant operations. And this is within recreation.
So there are a lot of them, the YMCA, private clubs, not-for-profits. Here in Canada, we have many examples of larger not-for-profits, $200 million leisure centers that have to earn all of their own money. They generally have fairly strong data collection and data management processes that feed into decision making because they have this imperative. The imperative is that they have to earn 100% revenue Sorry, 100% of their costs. Then we have, as is very, very common in the public sector, we have non-revenue-reliant operations that maybe earn 60 to 70%, 50% of their costs and pools, leisure centers, arenas, many, many different examples. They have different metrics, of course, but their focus is on usage and cost containment.
Do we have big numbers, et cetera? It was really interesting because I also do a bunch of consulting in this, and I chatted with a bunch of my consultant colleagues, and we've all been doing this for a very long time. The point came up, it wasn't my point, but it's a good one. The point came up that often within public recreation, the most rigorous metric evaluation is done at its initial feasibility. Here you have this feasibility and you're going to build $100 million, $200 million leisure center, and it's a public, public recreation, publicly funded, government funded.
There's an enormous amount of rigor that goes into that initial feasibility. After it's built, that's not always the case. There are certainly some folks that track very important metrics like revenue per user, which is yield, cost per user, which is a very important as well. There are many others. Okay, next slide.
On the revenue reliant side, there's this one report and this one group, and it's a Health and Fitness Association. It's based out of the US, but it works all over the world. They have this report, and you can find it here. It's extremely detailed. It's That's one of the most detailed reports you can see that I've ever seen in the recreation side, covering membership behavior, industry business models, demographics, implications, All sorts of trends. Very, very good data collection. But here's the thing.
It's very often a one-time consultant report. Is this done on a regular basis or is this done every every three or four years when they are contemplating some shift. Another very important metric that we've used is market share analysis. Again, that's often a one-time report. But We've done work in large cities where we would see, of all the people that are purchasing swim lessons, how many of them are going to the YMCA versus how many of them are going to the city versus how many of them are going to private clubs. If that could be done on even a biannual way, that is extremely useful.
Next slide, please, John. I'm going to be very quick. Now, this is one, and I raise this because we've actually used this a number of times, and this is in the public recreation sphere. In this particular graph, you have the blue line and the green line. The blue line is this particular group, which is City of Airdre and their massive leisure center. It's really about the cost or the expenditure per user.
We find that that is probably one of the most common metrics used in public recreation. Why? Well, probably because we have elected officials that are worried about how much money is being spent, and they want to try and ensure that there's a high degree of efficiency. So this particular figure tends to get quite a bit of attention. Emphasis on cost containment. And then the last slide.
And then the last slide, this is really where I did the work that I was supposed to, because other than that, I But in terms of the work that I was supposed to do was to bring in measures from tourism. Yes, we work a lot in tourism, and I really just have this broken down. This is the way it is. I can say this very confidently in Canada.
In Canada, in the tourism sector, we have smaller operations. The family-owned hotel. The family-owned hotel.
Do they do a lot of data collection? They do a little bit. Are they consistent? Usually. Are they collecting data? They're generally collecting very little data, and they will use it the best way they can. Where do they get their market intelligence? They get their market intelligence via industry They go to reports, they go to conferences where all sorts of people speak on it, but there's not a great deal of reliance on their own data collection. Then, of course, we have the larger operations. I think we all know this.
There's a great flight to big data where you get hotel change and Expedia, the airlines, etc. A lot of that decision making, of course, is now completely digitized, and it's based on algorithmic work. But that is out of reach for a lot of tourism.
It's also definitely out of reach for recreation, because within recreation, what do we have? It's very dispersed, as opposed to having the huge platforms like Expedia and others. And I would love to hear from Leonardo on this slide. Okay. All right. Excellent. So thank you for that, Joe. I don't know how to comment on this.
I've been involved with a project here in Victoria where the Professional Association for Aquatic and Recreation centers is trying to design data collection tools to provide industry-based based information. And they're quite good at getting the economic data. But what we've been working with them on is getting some of the public value data. How do they measure public value? And that may be a theme for another topic that we'll pick up on.
So let's open up the conversation a little bit. Joe or Leonardo, do you have any questions for each other? Or how are we going on the chat side of things. Jo An, have we got any questions there? I don't see anybody. I can't think of any. We could certainly open it. Yes.
Okay. Well, listen, let me draw in Bramante to this conversation. We talked a little bit about this in our pre-planning, and you made some comments about the delivery of leisure experiences in Brazil and the nature of how they manage evaluation. Could Can you share some of your insights on that, please, Pramante? Oh, yes. Thank you very much.
It's always a nice experience to be here. Well, in this past, at least four decades, trying to do some research and acting in the field in the private sector, but much more on the public sector, what we have seen is that people spend more time on doing things than planning and evaluating. It is very frustrating when we see that people tend to continue to do things and to They do not separate enough time, sufficient time, to collect data.
Then even worse, when they collect data, they don't treat those data That information does not become an intelligent information that will provide some guidelines for interaction. I would like to share with Leonardo and Joe if this is the reality that you have seen, that it seems that people who work in the field, they don't have enough time and they are prepared to do things rather than planning and evaluating and using intelligent data to change or maintaining what they are doing or expanding what they are doing. I would agree with that. I would agree that my experience of working in public recreation and then working with public recreation is that that part of the job is often not given enough value and enough time and resources. I would say when you speak to people in tourism who are in SMEs, small, medium enterprises, they will tell you that they're working 20 hours a day just keeping the whole place going, and they have very little time to to do that strategic work.
I agree with that. But to complement, I would say, talking about commercial tourist companies, as bigger the company is, They have more resources and structure to work on it. Normally, monitoring the performance, it's basic, it's baseline to understand. Even if, for example, I've been working in some companies that we have regular meetings, and we need to provide some data analysis to bring the results weekly or monthly. In the other hands, I work in other ones that we didn't have that so schedule, like every week or every month. But when we were finishing the semester, for example, or when we were planning the next year, so we needed to analyze all the data in a once to understand which path would we take.
I believe that when we are talking about big private companies, normally they do have an unscheduled and frequently analysis of performance to monitor it. It's imperative. Thank you. Okay. Okay. So I'd like to ask a different question for you, Leonardo, because you work in an international setting.
You're working in Brazil, but you're trying to organize people to gain experiences in an American theme parks and that type of thing. Do you take into account things like exchange rates, the value of the local currency and how that impact? Because I know here in Australia, there's lots of places in the world I'd like to go to, but the Australian dollar is not particularly strong right now. And it's like, Oh, I lose half of my money. One Australian dollars or two Australian dollars equals one Euro, and that impacts my international experience. Do you take those sorts of things into account when you start planning strategies and things? Definitely.
Exchange rate for Brazil. As you mentioned, the Australian dollar, the Brazilian Riyal is now also it's getting even more It's losing even more value against euros or US dollars. So that's an analysis that we are always doing. So we have an analysis considering our internal KPIs, so that one that I told you before. But also there's another analysis considering this numbers for example, exchange rates, or also even the economic scenario or the political scenario.
Because everything impacts in my business now, considering the international travels. We need to be very up to date into that. Basically, now we are facing here in Brazil since May May, early May, early June, a very big raise on the price of the US dollar against URIs, and that's already impacting the travel decision. It didn't pack yet the number of travelers to US or Europe, which are the strongest international markets for us. But we saw a postpone on the buying on the buying decision. So they still didn't cut the travel, but they are waiting the maximum they can to buy the tickets, to buy the hotels, to buy the cars.
Waiting for the rate exchange. So that's the thing that's super impacts. Yeah. And maybe, Joe, if you could step in here. I know, again, in Australia, in a lot of other places around the world. Cost of living is a very important issue at the moment, and inflation has been an issue.
I know in places like the UK, they had inflation up over 10 % for a period of time. Do you think the community leisure services are taking those cost of lifting challenges into account? They develop strategies to increase participation or in some instances, their revenues and things like that? I think so. I think that that happens. But I'll tell you something interesting. We were doing a bunch of research with member holders at a public leisure center, and we showed them some price points for an annual family membership, and they said it's very expensive.
And it wasn't. But it was, obviously. So we had to probe Why is this expensive? One of the things that we realized was that families were trying to carry out a number of functional equivalents. You had a family that had a leisure pass, but they also wanted to go skiing.
They also wanted to do a trip here. For the leisure center, the leisure center thought that that price point was extremely fair. In the context of the lifestyle, that price point was problematic when bringing together all of these other things. The only way we would actually learn that is through this qualitative focus group where we could actually ask them about it. But that was a really interesting learning right there.
Okay. Well, we're running close to the end of time. I just want to finish with one question, and that's something that we're very keen to continue to explore within the Leisure Management Sig is leisure management research. So what are your thoughts on the nature of publicly available research about the things that we've been talking about in terms of performance assessment? What's going on that you're aware of or what do we need to do? So any thoughts on the nature of the research that's being published about all of what we've been talking about? I would love to see more research in public recreation in general. I think that there's very little there, and there's very little on this particular topic, which is understanding metrics to improve performance and yield. I would say that it is lacking.
There's always going to be industry reports, there's consultant reports, etc. They're usually not that accessible. Okay. Leonardo? Yeah, I totally agree with Joe. I think any analysis involving different metrics is very valuable for everyone.
A big problem that the researchers may face is that not all of the data, but there's a lot of data in the private sector, so I'm not sure how they could reach this data to make their research. But I'd love to see any deep diving research considering customer behaviors or perceptions and linking it to any metrics that they could get. Because one thing that I also felt, it's hard to find. We've made some research.
We paid for the research for research the last two years to understand market perception. Every research, considering that, I think that would be valuable for most of the companies, not on companies, but universities, everybody who is researching it. That would be very nice.
Okay. Well, thank you. Go ahead, Jo An. Well, I was just going to say I agree with Leonardo. I think it's hard to access some of that data.
I remember not too terribly long ago being in a workshop and talking about metrics and things like that. Presenter was actually from the YMCA. They handed out a bunch of handouts, and they all had numbers on them. She talked us through the worksheets and showed us what they were doing and then proceeded to collect all of them because it was proprietary data. She wouldn't let anybody use the room until she had every single one of them back. It was like collecting a test from a group of students.
It was so It's disappointing because, I don't know, it's not like it's a private industry. I mean, it's nonprofit. I don't know.
I just thought it was, why did you say that you would come and share and teach and then not really want anybody to have anything. I went up and talked to her afterwards and said, Look, I'm an academic. I teach this at school. Can I have any? No.
It's the only way my boss would let me come is if I bring it all back with me. Okay. Yeah, I just... I've been bugging Clayton in the chat about coming up with a question. So hopefully he's come up with one here.
He may bounce in in just a moment. But anyway, there's my two cents. Okay.
All right. Well, listen, I'll just give a plug. If you do want to see about some of the issues and the research about the industry, and I know there's going to be quite a bit of information at the next World Leisure Congress, which is in August next year in the Netherlands, and you can get more information from the World Leisure Organization website. But I know they're doing a lot of really fascinating work about designing experiences because there was a great series of sessions at the last World Leisure Congress in New Zealand. And there's a bit going on, and there's a few of us that are working in areas like this. And I'll send an to you, Jo, about some work that we did with some facility planning and the lack of certain elements in that planning.
Have we got a question from Clayton? No. Okay. Well, let's bring things to a I suppose. He just apologized, but he said, no, we've answered his questions. Well, that's good to know. That's excellent. I will just share a little bit of a contact with for further information. Let me get that up.
So thank you to everybody for joining the webinar, and welcome again to anyone who's seeing this as the video. I want to extend special thanks to Isabelle and Maya and the World Leisure Secretariat for their guidance on the delivery of the Zoom webinar format. Thank you to Jo An and Bramante who collaborate with me as we deliver these different sorts of activities.
We have a great team, and it's really interesting to continue to work with them. Special thanks to Leonardo and Joe for your willingness to share your insights about tourism and community leisure assessment. It's an area that, to me, I've learned a lot from our conversation today, and I hope others do as well. It's wonderful to have leisure colleagues who are willing to contribute your expertise to help meet the World Leisure's mission about sharing leisure's capacity as a central force to enhance the human condition. I've always argued within leisure management that what we do is help managers do what they do better.
And part of what we've talked about today is very much helping leisure managers to be more effective at delivering the experiences that they do. So we'll continue doing those things. Thank you to everybody. The people that registered will be e-mailed a link to the webinar if you want to go back and use it.
The link will also be on the Leisure Management Special Interest Group's website as part of the World Leisure Organization. Thank you to everyone. I hope you have a good afternoon, a good morning, a good evening, wherever in the world you may be. Thanks very much, everyone.
Thank you.
2024-11-10 11:04
