Developing effective strategies for tackling seasonality in the tourism industry

Seasonality is a key aspect for the performance of the majority of tourism enterprises and a central theme for policy makers. The usual practice of strategy formulation in this area, whilst often involving a sound analysis of objective performance data, largely ignores the perceptions which the businesses concerned have of the seasonality issue. This paper demonstrates that the heterogeneity of attitudes and perceptions in the sector need to be recognised when developing effective strategies for tackling seasonality. An empirical quantitative approach is applied using occupancy data of the serviced accommodation sector in addition to a survey of owner/managers. The findings indicate that an insufficiently detailed level of segmentation of the business sector concerned may lead to ill-focused broad-brush strategies and consequent misallocations of resources. The paper contends that policy makers in this area need information beyond what can be obtained from the usual performance measurement systems