Planning Effective Experiences

Tasmania is not selling its nature, food and wine or history; these are just things.

Its real tourism challenge is to influence the way people experience these things – the way they think about them and the sense of meaning they attach to them.

There are four easy steps to planning effective visitor experiences.

Know your customer

It’s important to know your customer. Get to know the Tasmanian tourism market. Find out who your ‘best prospect’ customers are and what kind of experiences they’re looking for.

See Tourism Tasmania’s market research elsewhere on this website, including Tasmanian Visitor Survey findings and up-to-date specialist reports.

Align with a brand

A brand is a set of beliefs or associations that exist about a product, destination or place.

Brands have functional and emotional elements that enable us to form relationships with them. We identify with what it is they offer us.

Brands exist at a number of levels. For example, brands in the Tasmanian tourism environment include a state tourism brand (Island of Inspiration), regional brands, business brands, and product or experience brands.

It makes good business sense to align your product with the relevant brands, especially the Tasmanian tourism brand and your regional brand.

Your visitor experiences and your business will benefit from the brand awareness generated by a wide range of state and regional marketing activities.

‘Hooking up’ to this brand awareness will generate better value from the visitor market while failure to align with these brands is a missed opportunity for your business.

Find out more about brand in this short video clip.

Integrate the experience

Integrate the experience by thinking about each of the four layers of an experience:

• place and its key appeal and capacity for visitor connection
• the quality and type of infrastructure that’s needed
• the quality, style and type of services
• value-adding to it all through meaningful interpretation.

To maximise the impact of the experience, each of the layers must deliver consistent quality, targeted to the needs of the market.

Deliver the Experience

Communication is central to the delivery of the experience. Thematic interpretation has been widely adopted in Tasmania as an approach that helps tourism businesses shape the bond between their customers and the local place.

Some of the best delivery provides the circumstances for customers to create their own experience for themselves, often led by a guide.

While interpretation can involve a wide range of communication, research shows that face-to-face delivery is consistently acknowledged by visitors as the most effective.

Its strength is that it enables the creation of a relationship.

Delivering effective visitor experiences means paying attention to every aspect of the experience in a holistic way, including managing the communication, even before customers arrive.

The roles of all those who have customer contact are also important. People – not just tour guides but all frontline personnel – play an important role in providing an experience. 

Every moment of contact – whether face-to-face, in a brochure or on a website – will either enhance the visitor experience, detract from it, or be a missed opportunity to have any impact at all.

Some Tasmanian tourism operators also use the visitor experience framework to extend their product life cycle, extending or redesigning the experience to refresh its appeal.

For a step-by-step approach to interpretation planning see the Tasmanian Thematic Interpretation Planning Manual

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