Revisiting traditional approaches to the marketing of tourism and hospitality

This introductory chapter clarifies the meaning of marketing and outlines the origins of the four traditional marketing concepts. It then outlines the strategic marketing planning process before highlighting those characteristics that make the marketing of tourism and hospitality products and services so challenging. In a fast-changing and ever-more complicated world, the need to understand such characteristics are instrumental in the development of effective marketing strategies. This is particularly so with the emergence of the experience economy and the migration from more traditional economic approaches. Tourism and hospitality is at the forefront of the experience economy with the changing dynamics of individual and group patterns of consumption, serving as the catalysts for change.