Weihai Tourism Marketing Strategy Research

By the end of the 20th century the tourism industry had developed proportionally to the public's awareness of it's potential. Tourists continuously demanded new destinations. As modern tourism progressed, it became possible for every one to be a tourist and everywhere to be a tourist destination. As the new century opened tourists now had more options with each tourist destination. Since this meant that the competition, within the industry, of attracting more tourists had become very strong, marketing became the key issue and remains so. As the marketing of destinations has become the key factor of linking the tourist supply and the tourist demand, and also is the essential and main way for the competition to promote the destinations, it becomes necessary to do a profound and comprehensive study of destination marketing from the point of strategic point of view.The marketing of tourist destinations is the new thought that drives tourist marketing. It's a kind of marketing activities in which all of the tourism enterprises, tourism organizations and tourism institutions as a whole unity is taken into consideration. So the key question faced by a region is to put the theory of tourist destination marketing into practice. Weihai is a famous tour city with beautiful mountains and sea, fascinating views, agreeable climate and lots of historical sites. Thus To attract more tourists is the most important issue concerned by the government, citizens and each tour enterprises in Weihai. In this article, with a view of incorporating the three cities and one district, implementing the basic theories and means of marketing, having an empirical study on Weihai tourism, the writer will show a tourist destination marketing strategy which is suitable for the development of Weihai. The writer hope the study can have a directional effect on the practice of future tourist marketing in Weihai.The first part of the paper focuses on the material collections of present situations of tourist destinations at home and abroad, trying to find out the outline and progress of marketing studies in scientific field.The second part of the essay is to define the concept of destination marketing and tourist destinations on the base of those scholars' studies, and tell the necessity oftourist destination marketing and the urgency of developing tourist marketing in Weihai.The third and fourth part concentrate on the research of tourist marketing conditions in Weihai according to the questionnaires made by writer in summer in 2004, statistics, policy and data. In SWOT method the writer researched the respects of tourist resources, tourist competitors and tourist services. Then researched the present situations of international and domestic markets with regard to Weihai as a tourist destination ,try to find out the developing characteristics of Weihai tourist markets.The fifth part firstly to introduce the existent various international domestic organizations and its relative merits, then on the base of summarizing the experiences of those organizations, point out the right mode of organizations which is suitable for Weihai tourist destination marketing.The last part presents the strategies of Weihai tourist marketing including the tourist image strategy, market -expanding strategy, united competition strategy, the strategy of marketing combination and network marketing strategy. In the end, the writer presents the conditions to ensure the implementation of marketing strategies.