CityCountry Location Assessment

Learning Outcomes:

Students should gain familiarity with the following elements of business information literacy and specific information resources.

Information Literacy:

• The kinds of country & city information that are freely available on the Internet compared to those paid for by the library.
• The use of country-specific numeric data.
• The effect of a nation's size and political economy on the quantity and quality of information available for a market.
• Ethical use of licensed information and alternative information sources post-graduation.

Resources:

• A source for city-specific tourism strategy, flow, and infrastructure.
• A source for country-specific inbound tourism data and tourism expenditures.
• A source for country competitiveness data.
• A source for city-specific tourism events, attractions, and marketing.

Premise:

You have been hired by an event planning company that has plans to expand to several cities across the world. The director plans to have an online conference call of the board of executives and showcase the possible cities for expansion. Thus, you are required to create a report for your city providing an overview of the tourism environment. You will create a Prezi or Powerpoint and provide the following information: It should contain 8-15 Prezi spaces or Powerpoint slides.

City Brief introduction to the city. (150-200 words)

Tourism Overview (Passport GMID: City Briefing)

• Summarize the brand/strategy/SWOT of the city
• Summarize the Tourism Flows, especially the leisure vs business travel situation
• Summarize one additional area: Travel Accommodation or Transportation or Tourist Attractions & Activities

Country of your City Inbound Tourism (World Tourism Organization - Tourism Factbook) Usually found in the Basic Indicators report.

• Inbound Tourism - Arrivals: Total: Overnight Visitors
  • 3+ years of data
• Expenditures - Total - Travel
  • 3+ years of data

Tourism Competitiveness (World Economic Forum - Travel and Tourism Competitiveness Report) Show rankings for the following elements

• Travel & Tourism Competitive Report
• Environmental Sustainability
• Safety & Security
• Tourism Infrastructure

Compare these rankings to the United States' rankings

City Open web information

• Include 2 additional pieces of information that promote the city from official tourism or convention & visitors' bureau websites, travel websites or related sources.

Note: This case uses Euromonitor's Passport database (Formerly Global Market Information Database GMID) as the primary source. Passport GMID contains a selection of City Briefings for majors cities of the world. A list is created and the students select which city they would like to use for the assignment. I usually create a list that requires 2 students per city; this allows for comparison during grading the assignment. Alternatives for piecemeal data could include utilizing city convention and visitor's bureau information from the Web and city/country tourism data from governmental Web sites.

Preliminary Discussion:

Hospitality & Tourism Management students often seek employment all over the world. An initial discussion regarding how a geographic location markets itself to tourists and how that is relevant to running a business in that specific city and country should be presented to students. Discussing the use of text, numeric, and visual images within a single presentation would also be beneficial. Additional commentary on the availability of international job postings could be included with the connection that a student would conduct this same type of research to understand where they might be working and living.

Resources:

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First Resource: Identifying the elements of a city's brand, strategy, and infrastructure is the core component of this assignment. It is not obvious how to identify what constitutes the strategy and brand of a city. The Passport GMID City Briefings provide a framework for understanding a selection of cities. The librarian can demonstrate how to find the City Briefings using a keyword search approach. The next step is to highlight the different sections within the City Briefing

Second Resource: Two sources are focused on here: World Tourism Organization - Tourism Factbook and the World Economic Forum - Travel and Tourism Competitiveness Report. These two sources provide a wealth of information on country travel statistics. It is useful in the context of this assignment for understanding the broader scope of tourism traffic and expenditures in a country. The Tourism Factbook provides statistical data on tourist flows and expenditures while the Competitiveness Report provides rankings on a variety of categories.

Third Resource: The abundance of information related to tourism on the web makes it meaningful to search for additional content. The third source is to conduct a search of the open web to seek out additional sources of city and country tourism information. This is especially useful in identifying upcoming events and recent attractions. It can also involve reviewing recent traveler reviews from sites like TripAdvisor or Travelocity; adding a layer of consumer feedback to consider.

Wrap Up:

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The assignment is designed to give students insight into the variety of sources available for international city and country research. It also exposes them to potential locations of employment and how to conduct research into these locations from a tourism perspective. It can be explained that there are many additional sources of tourism-related data that are relevant for their future studies as well as their future career.

Submitted By:

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Assoc Prof Hal Kirkwood, Business Information Specialist, Purdue University – Roland G. Parrish Library of Management & Economics [1]

Originally Submitted: August 10, 2016