Tourism & More

Tourism often provokes a changing demographic, economic, political, and sociological profile in a community. These changes, if not managed properly can create havoc with a community’s social structure. This course examines

• why change is hard
• how to introduce change
• what not to do
• the politics and psychology of change

This seminar discusses the pros and cons of qualitative and quantitative research. It demonstrates when to use each form of research, what are its economic advantages and disadvantages, and what forms of qualitative and quantitative research work best for different communities. The seminar presents:

• time lines and time tables for research
• research costs and how to keep them low
• how to explain your research to the community at large
• how to use theory as an inexpensive way to avoid expensive survey research
• how to turn your research into action

This course is designed to help communities take advantage of the extra-terrestrial tourism fade. The course looks at

• who is interested in extra-terrestrials
• how to advertise
• services needed
• extra-terrestrial tourism as a form of postmodernism
• how to use extra-terrestrial as a means for economic development.

The course also discusses what other communities are doing, types of people extraterrestrial tourism attracts, and types of services needed.

This seminar will investigate the impact of the police on a community’s tourist industry? The seminar will cover:

• how can the police have a positive impact on tourism
• police as information sources
• police as goodwill ambassadors
• police as front line medical personnel
• how police may be a negative factor on tourism -
• flash-points between the police and the tourist industry
• the threat of terrorism

This seminar will also to discuss ways to develop interactive alliances between the travel and law enforcement industries. The seminar looks at the costs of crime and the steps CVB’s can take to help protect the industry.

This seminar provides an introduction to the methodologies and theories of tourism. This seminar, conducted in a workshop format, provides the “how-to’s and do’s and don’ts” of tourism research and development. The seminar is designed for small communities whose staff member(s) must be multifaceted, and who seek guidance in the following areas:

• How to seek grants
• The basic concepts of qualitative research
• The basic concepts of quantitative research
• The basic concepts of promotion
• The tools of tourism

Components within an organization often work toward individual rather than common agenda. This seminar will discuss various ways to create an atmosphere for team work among the various agencies within a large organizational structure. The seminar will look at:

• potential obstacles to cooperation
• techniques for feedback analysis
• methods to create higher levels of cooperation

This seminar is designed to delineate types of tourist groups. This seminar will focus on such questions as: What segment mix should a community target? What needs do tourists/visitors have? What is the sociology of the business traveler?, What is the sociology of the transient leisure traveler? What is the sociology of the resort leisure traveler? This seminar will cover:

• principles of market segmentation

• creation of demographic profiles

• development of questionnaires

• distribution of questionnaires

•stratification by socio-economic groups

• attraction analysis

This seminar provides insights into the complex world of marketing an American product to the outside world. The seminar focuses on issues such as:

• Special problems of the foreign tourist
• Differences in the social make-up of the European, Asian, and Latin American tourist
• Handling foreign currencies
• Issues of language
• Issues of culture
• Preparing one’s community for the foreign visitor

This seminar combines the best of tourism oriented policing with the ideas of hospitality and customer service. It is meant as a guide so that tourism professionals can create a hospitable tourism environment so that the community can benefit from repeat tourism. The seminar gives information on material such as:

• the art of giving directions
• how to develop a tourism policing manual
• how to deal with multi-cultural tourism
• how to work with non-English speaking international visitors

This seminar helps you to design a tourism business strategy by understanding such questions as:

• who are your tourism customers,
• what do your customers want,
• how is tourism like a business and how does it differ,
• who should and should not be a “customer,”
• why should someone chose my community to visit over another community,
• is market-share important?

This seminar is tailored so that each participant will take home a specific business plan for his/her community.

This seminar focuses on how rural communities can use their resources to create a viable tourism industry while being sensitive to the local ecology and culture of a community. Among the topics to be covered are:

• County-side publicity
• Developing rural attractions
• Selecting the right market
• Working within the local political framework

This seminar will cover such topics as: How can service personnel be inspired to become community representatives? This seminar is appropriate not only for people in the tourism/visitor industry but also for communities that wish to treat their citizens as guests. Some of the topics that are addressed are:

• keeping your service personnel current on local happenings;
• deciding on which type of service best fits the needs of those visiting a specific community;
• understanding the sociology of good manners,
• a multi-cultural look at how ethnicity may define “politeness.”

This seminar will cover the sociology of those born during the baby boom and compare them to the generation which follows. The seminar will look at:

• women in the work force and how it pertains to tourism
• the interaction between vacation and child care
• the effect of two income households on vacation time
• yuppy travel patterns
• the use of snob appeal in the tourist industry

This seminar is designed to highlight the potentials and pitfalls of common advertising techniques. This seminar will cover:

brochure analysis

• matching expectations with reality
• color analysis – what messages do colors send
• font and print selection
• how to select the right advertising vehicles

This seminar will focus on how to measure a tourist’s reaction to a community. Emphasis will be placed on the art of the questionnaire. The seminar will cover such topics as:

• What can be asked of a tourist,
• What cannot be asked,
• How can a questionnaire be constructed so as to yield the greatest amount of useful information,
• What are the proper ways to distribute a questionnaire?

This seminar is designed to delineate types of conventions. It will present a taxonomy of the convention industry illustrating the social and economic realities of each type of convention. This seminar will focus on such topics as:

• What is the sociology of the convention participant
• What needs do participants have
• How can the demographic profile of the participant be determined
• How can convention business be an entry into greater tourist revenue
• What type of convention is best for your community: Economically and Politically

This seminar looks at the composition of people who take group tours. Who are they, what special needs do they have. The seminar covers topics such as:

• the US versus European group tourist
• caring for the group tourist
• getting the group tourist to want to return
• selling to the group tourist: the art of the souvenir
• the culture of the group tourist

This seminar shows how important a police department is to the success of a tourism product. The seminar also demonstrates how much policing can learn from tourism, Some of the topics covered are:

• how tourism can help police departments improve customer service
• how tourism can help police departments to increase salaries
• how police departments and tourism entities can create meaningful dialogue
• how police departments can play a significant role in improving the community’s quality of life
• how police departments can become attractions and how tourism units can become a part of law enforcement.

This seminar provides insights into tourism’s multifaceted community roles. Among the subjects discussed are:

• the direct economic benefits of tourism
• the direct social benefits of tourism
• tourism’s role as a tool in the attraction of other industries
• tourism’s role in the development of local pride
• how tourist and political leaders can work together

This seminar gives food for thought on how present trends will impact on the tourist industry of tomorrow. Among the trends to be discussed are:

• new technologies in the field of transportation
• new technologies in the field of communication
• demographic patterns
• the allocation of time between work and play
• the lengthening of the public school year and its impact on the family vacation

This seminar will seek to provide an overview of the industry’s major “players.” Emphasis will be placed on the ways that the actions of one segment in the industry affects all other segments. Some examples are:

• the effect of hotel marketing on local attractions
• the effect of transportation arteries on restaurants
• the effect of destination development on local businesses

The seminar is designed to encourage cooperation between tourism’s various segments.

This seminar will teach a community to determine casinos gaming’s effects on such key issues as:

• casinos’ effects on crime
• casinos’ effects on hotel occupancy
• casinos’ effects on local attraction attendance
• casinos’ effects on local restaurants
• casinos’ effects on service industry employment

It then guidelines for individual communality research and plans for action.

This seminar will define how and why tourism is economic development. It discusses a broad range of topics such as:

• generating new money in the community
• tax revenues
• job creation
• economic preservation
• tourism’s role in quality of life
• tourism as an ally for economic development in other industries

This seminar is designed to help a community delineate which tourist groups it has the best chance of attracting in the early parts of the next century. This seminar will focus on such questions as: (1) How to determine which future trends will most effect your community, (2) What segment mix should a community target? What needs will tourists/visitors have? What will be the sociology of tomorrow’s travelers? What role will such participatory sports, as golf, play in future travel marketing? Among the items this seminar will cover (given in alphabetical order) are:

• attraction analysis by sociological groups
• demographic patterns and niche marketing
• how the issue of an aging population will effect leisure activities
• how we will allocate our time between work and play
• marketing to the Twenty-First century traveler
• types of travelers and their needs
• participatory sports such as golf
• new technologies in the field of communication
• principles of market segmentation
• the lengthening of the public school year and its impact on the family vacation
• Twenty-First century market segmentation

This seminar focuses on a unique program that was first developed for police departments and then extended to other city agencies. The program discusses how public employees can be trained through tourism education such skills as:

• Being community hosts,
• Law enforcement’s role in being hospitable to tourists, why the police,
• Insights into the sociology of tourism,
• The special needs and issues of such groups as: the elderly tourist, the woman tourist, or the international tourist,
• Dealing with tourism gender issues: male to male, male to female, female to female, and female to male,
• The role of refuse collection, electrical companies, etc. in tourism,
• Psychological strategies for dealing with problems caused by tourists,
• Understanding and creating positive speech patterns,
• Tourism’s role in racial/cultural issues,
• How to deal with an angry tourist;
• How to develop cooperation between city departments and local CVBs.

This seminar examines different types of welcome centers. It provides a cross-cultural look at welcome centers around the world, This seminar can be given as a one or two part course.

Part 1 deals with the theories and concepts of good service:

• Defining good service:
• Who uses welcome centers and for what reasons
• Different needs of the foreign and local (national) tourist
• Language difficulties

In Lecture 2 looks at:

• Looking at brochures at welcome centers
• Police as tourism promoters
• Training tourism center staffs
• Making a geographic area tourism sensitive:
• How welcome centers need to work with government officials, waiters and waitresses, restauranteurs and hoteliers, and the local press

This seminar examines the challenge of alternative school calendars to the tourism industry. With over 4,000 school districts having abolished some form of the traditional summer, the tourism industry needs to know how to react and what to do. This seminar touches upon:

• types of alternative educational calendars
• who wins, who loses
• how to prepare a document for your legislature
• with whom to form a coalition
• should tourism sacrifice itself for the good of our children?
• does year-round education help children?
• how can tourism become help our children to learn?

This seminar will address what the tourism professional needs to know about the current state of the US economy, from how the changes in health care will impact tourism to issues concerning the stock market. It will segment the economy by groups and look at both past economic history as it pertains to tourism and future trends.

Terrorism is a double threat to tourism, not only from a physical standpoint, but also from a media standpoint. This seminar looks at how tourism’s different component parts are impact by terrorism and counter terrorism policy. This lecture will examine which parts of the industry are most impacted and how to or not react to an ever evolving situation.

This seminar focuses in on tourism marketing strategies vis-à-vis tourism sectors, such as age, ethnic grouping and sociological factors. It examines why some strategies have worked in the past and others have failed. It then asks the question do past successes or failures indicate the same results under different circumstances?

The best way to avoid a the cost of a crisis recovery is to have good risk management and thereby avoid the crisis. This seminar looks at the many ways to do risk management even on a low budget and then how to save money in every aspect of one’s business.

Unfortunately bad things do happen, and when they happen often the media can make a bad situation worse. This seminar provides suggestions on how to speak or not speak with the media, how to turn the media into an ally and what to do before a crisis occurs.

We have two ears and one mouth as a sign that we need to learn how to listen more and carefully. Good listening does not mean winning every argument. It does mean understanding what the other person is saying on both an overt and covert level. This seminar addresses the issues of how to be still and discern what the other person is really saying. What is a client trying to express and when should we answer and when is the best course of action providing our clients with a sounding board. The art of listening is not only useful in client relations but is also useful within an organization so that all members know what the organization’s policy is.

Not all marketing works for every segment of the tourism population. This seminar looks at what attracts different segments of the tourism population, what do push and what not to push. The session wil segment the US tourism population not only by age and sex but by likes and dislikes. The material will then be presented in a way that a business can use this knowledge to increase its clientele in a way that turns first time customers into satisfied customers who wish to return.

The US is fast becoming one of the world’s great destinations. Tourism to this country however is not uni-dimensional and there are great differences in what a Latin American desires and what someone from Eastern or South Asia desires in a visit to the US. This seminar focuses on different major cultural groups, issues of language, and the need to understand each nation’s concept of time and cultural demands.

Know the law is not enough. Although all Americans are equal in the eyes of the law, equality does not means return business. Not all American tourists are alike and understand ethnic differences, by region and by cultural and ethnic groups allows not only a particular tourism industry to expand, but also can avoid sensitivity and diversity issues. This seminar also looks at the special needs of LGBT tourists and the needs of such overlooked groups as the traveling single-dad.

A major problem in tourism is that many parts of the industry are not seen as credible in the eyes of its clients. This seminar distinguishes between what is legal and what is ethical. It concentrates on how we can increase our business by building of reputation in which we do the right thing rather than merely giving the legally necessary response.

Everyone has a bad day and some people seem to have a continuous angry or bad day. In a customer service industry such as tourism, rude and angry behavior is more than an annoyance it is a liability. This seminar focuses on how do we turn frowns into smiles and turn a difficult personal experience into a positive one.

Security in today’s world is a top priority. Most police officers have little or no understanding of their role in economic development. This course in TOPPs (Toursm Oriented Policing/Protection Services) transforms police officers into both security specialists and tourism promoters. The course teaches both tourism professionals and police officers how the police can add to the bottom line rather than being negatively impacting the bottom line.
occur, how to overcome it and go beyond it.