Author: Andre Coleman

It’s not easy to leave your country of origin and to settle down in another country where you are a visitor but my experience in staying Malaysia is incredible. Malaysia is one of the most beautiful and fascinating tourism destinations of South East Asia. Malaysia comprises out two parts, Peninsular Malaysia, which is located between Thailand in the north and Singapore in the south, and the two provinces Sabah and Sarawak, located on Borneo. It has a rich history courting back to the 13^th century moreover it was a busy port for Europeans and far trades for many hundred years. It is a multiracial country with has a rich cultural heritage and a population of 23.27 million consisting of 61 percent Malays, 30 percent Chinese, 8 percent Indians and 1 percent of other ethnic groups. In 15th century Malacca was the initial name to Malaysia. In the year of 1957 Malaysia gained its independence from the British. Later in 1963 after the fusion of Singapore Sarawak and Sabah into a central union in which Malacca was called Malaysia. It is surprising to know that the Diversity of races, religions and cultures is an important characteristic of Malaysians. As moving from past to 21^st century Malaysia is a modern city with shopping mall, cinemas, international hotels and star bucks everywhere. Knowing the brief history behind Malaysia after 4 hours sitting on plane I arrived into Kuala Lumpur which is the capital and the largest city in Malaysia. I was greeted by a member of a staff who then latterly took me off to hostel that night. Next morning I was warmly greeted and met the rest of the international students. It was a great day meeting them because I was happy to meet some of my collides who stayed with me in Srilanka. Accommodation costs are comparatively cheaper away from the city so as i moved into an apartment about 5-8 minutes’ walk from campus. At the campus there were rich variety of backgrounds, nationalities and cultures. Accommodating a community of 40% international students, studying at the Malaysia Campus is a great way to meet people from across the globe, learn about their cultures and communicate people about your own. Being in a newly expanded campus most of the facilities were new, Wireless network, library with latest collections of books, nice lecture hall with new computer and projector and also the shuttle service were amazing. The courses and teaching methods were not very different from what i have learnt in my country. When it comes to food Malaysia food is a mix of Indian, Chinese, Burmese and traditional Malay style. As for now I used to have my lunch, dinner in cafeteria. Sometimes when i get sick of the campus food I would just go to the restaurants nearby because there are number of small home style restaurants that offer delicious food at low prices.

Trying out the Malaysians national dish Nasi lemak which is served with steamed rice, coconut milk, curry chicken or beef, fried anchovies and sambal was totally different when comes to the taste of red rice and curry.

As a Sri Lankan student in Malaysia I wasn’t felt out of place because Malaysian culture is so way similar to srilankan traditions. On top of that, there are many places of interests in country such as beaches, islands and rain forest where you could fresh out from stress.

Malaysia’s rain forest is deliberated as the oldest in the world so as the largest flower of the world, Rafflesia, is found in the rainforest of Malaysia. The diverse species of animals and plant life continue to enthuse a great deal.

As a student to Malaysia, I discovered a wide range of customs and practices, some of which is different from what i practiced at my country. With different mix of races, religions and cultures Malaysians celebrate variety of festivals such as Chinese New Year, Hari Raya Puasa, ThaiPusasm, Deepavali and Christmas. Being an international student I did have its ups and downs. Major problem was adjusting with the language as Malay is the official language but English is also often spoken out as it is the second language, but I have largely adapted to it now. The pace of life in Malaysia is gentle, steady and everyone moves with a purpose and goal. Climate in Malaysia is different from my country as it’s generally warm throughout the year. Astonishingly they have only two seasons it’s the dry and the rainy season. Malaysia which is considered to be the most attracted tourist residence consists numerous places to visit such as the Kula Lumpur the largest and busiest city in Malaysia has the tallest twin buildings called Petronas Twin towers and it was established the world’s tallest towers in the period of 1998 to 2004 and the sixth tallest telecommunication tower in the world. Redang Island in Terengganu is one of the finest coral and marine ecosystems in Malaysia. Following with the Cameron highlands a place for coolness, fresh fruits and vegetables. The national park Pahang for ecological wonders. Moreover the Petaling Street, the Centre of Kuala Lumpur’s original Chinatown, maintains much of its traditional atmosphere, particularly at night and the Batu caves which is a limestone hill consists of series caves and caves temple located in north of Kula Lumpur. I explored some of the best cultural and natural sights, venues and places in Malaysia. One of the best places I visited in Malaysia was the Sunway Lagoon Theme Park, because it has five different theme parks at one place. If Disney land is happiest place in earth probably Sunway Lagoon Theme Park the most exciting and amazing place to see. Malaysia has some of the most attractive cave systems in the world. Among the more famous are the Niah, Mulu and Clearwater caves. With a charted length of 100 kilometers, the latter is considered Asia’s longest cave system and grades tenth in the world. The Clearwater River which flows through this cave system is one of the world’s biggest famous underground rivers.

As others countries Malaysia is also endowed with natural resources such as agriculture, forestry and minerals. Rubber was one of the mainstays of Malaysia economy which was lately replaced by the oil palm.

Meanwhile Malaysia comprises three major cultures: Malay, Chinese and Indian, each culture has its own traditional and religious objects of clothing all of which is gender precise and may be altered to local impacts and conditions. The Malay wears the Baju Kurung and the Baju Kebaya. Besides the Chinese women wear the cheongsam, it is a one-piece dress with a high neck, diagonally closed with small clips or toggles. The Indians wear very colorful saris in a rich variety of bright and refined dyes for their usual prayer in the temple and for everyday living. However for the Malay culture, the men usually wear Baju Melayu with a cap, on their head. Traditional clothing for men in Malaysia consists of a silk or cotton skirt and shirt with a scarf like piece of cloth tied around his waist. Meanwhile the Indian men wear Sherwani, which is a coat like clothing fitted close to the body, of knee-length or longer and opening in front with button. They also wear Lungi, Dhoti and Kurta and Pajama.

Wedding style is unique from other countries. The activities that take place during Malay wedding often come from the diverse cultural traditions indigenous, Hindu and Islamic those have together served to shape traditional Malay culture. Each wedding take place in their traditional way.

Moreover the stability and peacefulness of Malaysia is a unique and a peaceful environment to live besides it is a great place if you love hot and humid climate, and if you are food lover.

This research work in progress describes the value of menu planning and other driving powers of the menu and the way that these can influence Hotel’s curriculum design. This research would generate some elements in the ongoing construction of theory about the menu planning consideration and the benefits of its in hotel industry. By using grounded theory methodology, theory is constructed from the empirical data. The outcomes of the research provided an overview of the divers’ value systems and driving powers of the respondents. Recommendations were made to have these value systems, driving powers and other characteristics to be taken into account by hospitality management schools in the curricula content and proximity to the industry. A moderate alert was issued in relation to schools’ size and format as perceived by the respondents. The research is going to be moved into a next phase that involves expanding the interview sample.

Hospitality industry is possibly the most dissimilar but specific industry in the world. Hospitality industry is certainly one of the largest industries. The hospitality Industry gives employment to millions of the people world wide. This industry range from the glamorous five-star hotels to the less stylish, but debatably more specialised, institutional areas such as hospitals, industrial outfits, schools and colleges. Yet of these many different sectors, catering has to be the most challenging. Whatever the size of the catering operation, the variety of opportunities available is endless. “The sky is the limit with catering” (Lebovitz D. 2007).

In the hospitality industry and more specifically upper segment hotel restaurants providing hospitality, the enjoyment of high quality food and beverages is viewed as part of a special culture. In this culture hospitableness is one of the central themes. Philosopher Telfer (1996) refers to ‘hospitableness’ as depending on devotion and a spirit of generosity rather than on skill. Practitioners or former-practitioners in the upper segment, like the researcher, can find reward, satisfaction and opportunities for personal learning and growth in the notion that hospitality and being hospitable carries substantive intrinsic value.

Telfer (1996) quotes three historic reasons for offering hospitality in a cultural perspective. Firstly, hospitality originally involved meeting travelers’ needs before modern means of travel and facilities existed. A biblical sense is referred to here where strangers should be looked after if they are in need. Secondly, giving, receiving and sharing food is a bond of the trust and interdependency set up between host and guest. In some cultures this is a permanent bond between people (e.g. traditional Bedouin will not fight anyone with whom they have eaten salt). Thirdly, giving food and beverages is a gesture of friendliness. Particularly where hosts try to give their guests agreeable food it can be considered as an act of pleasing as well as sustaining them. On the other hand however it would be fair to agree with Johnson et al. (2005) that because restaurants operate in a highly competitive business environment, it is often critical for the restaurateur to develop or try to develop a distinctive dining experience for increasingly discerning customers.

1.1. Catering Industry:
1.1.1. History:

Food is one of the most important things for any living individual. The trend of preparing food for others is really old, earlier cooking for other was for the hospitality only but as time moved on catering became the business industry. The history of catering and fine cooking trades dates back in the 4th millennium BC. Catering Industry started in Asia (China) but the culture of grand eating and drinking was already important during the prosperous years in old Egypt. However, the catering trade only emerged from the commonly practiced hospitality, which was always free, when the first real hostels and inns were built in ancient Greece (Kahan D.J., 1992).

As the world was on progress, the development in ancient Greece continued in the Roman Empire. In the beginning, the accommodations for Roman soldiers were found along the military roads and trading routes, which were ultimately opened to all travellers. In the time period of the Middle Ages in Europe, the initial signs of the rebirth of the catering trade were seen in monasteries which covered mainly the needs of the many Christian pilgrims going to Rome. Procession series served the same purpose in the Orient and started there around 600 AD. During Charlemagne’s time, the catering trade developed and spread throughout the entire Europe because transport and trade required secure accommodation (Kahan D.J., 2992).

The catering trade had been greatly influenced by the church in the later part of the middle Ages. Additionally, the newly established bourgeoisies, the flourishing trade, the natural economy being replaced with money, and the intensification of transport all contributed to the popularity of catering industry.

The catering industry was extensively spanned in Germany from 14th to 15th century and this had drawn the attention of representatives. The first “beer inspection” licenses were paid by the Augsburg Elector in 1530. It was also in the same year that the reorganization channel Policy law was acted out and this reinstated many regional regulations. Once the law was acted out, there were so many different rules took place for hotels and inns. Hotels and catering establishments were concerned about the new rules and this led to the regulation of the service of beverages, size of different type of glasses, and the quality and purity of beer, even the quantity and variety of dishes were brought up in the new regulations. As the time was passing new hotels associations built and these association worked for the development of the catering industry. The term “Seefahrts- und Schifferhauser” was first heard in the seaside towns during the Hanse era. At the same time these association took participation in the growing of new branches of the catering industry. The improvement of transport, technical innovations, population increase, and sudden rise in the trade of travel and tourism gave gastronomy a quick shift which made it a very important factor for national economy (Kahan D.J., 2992).

1.1.2 Catering Industry in brief:

Catering industry is a part of the Hotel Industry, The catering industry includes different places, institutions, hospitals and companies that provide meals eaten away from home. Basically a catering industry includes restaurants, schools and hospital cafeterias, catering operations, and many other formats, including “On-Premises” and “Off-Premises” caterings. Catering is a versatile segment of the food service industry. There is a slot for all types of catering businesses within the segment of catering. Food service industry is really a big industry and it includes different characters so in other terms the food service industry is divided into three general classifications: commercial segment, non-commercial segment, and military segment. Catering management is the combination of different task which are planning, organizing, controlling and executing. Planning of menu, staff, infrastructure, organizing the staff, organizing the different tools controlling the wastage, yield, and executing the outlets, all together influences the preparation and delivery of food, beverage, and related services at a competitive, yet profitable price. These activities work together to meet and exceed the customer’s perception of value for his money (Cousins J., 1999).

When providing menu choices to consumers, whether this is in a school, hospital, or other catering situation, it is important to plan the menus adequately. This planning will ensure not only that the menu is attractive and acceptable to the target consumers, but also that other aspects receive due consideration (Wiley J. & Sons, 2007).

Menu planning can mean many things to many people. Here, we are concerned with ensuring that the planned menu options presented can be shown to be nutritionally adequate and cost-effective. As individual day or meal menus and menu cycles (that is, the set of menus that make up a repeating pattern over a number of weeks) can contain large numbers of optional items, it is not normally possible to analyze combinations of dishes manually. The best that can be done without software tools is to make a few possible selections and work out the total nutrition and cost. This tells you nothing about the adequacy of the menu or menu cycle and would not be sufficient to audit the data (Lilicrap D., 1998).

Menu planning is the key part of the success of any hotel or restaurant. According to the researcher proper menu planning can be really useful to run the food and beverage operation smoothly. Anyone planning an event should offer several choices so that all guests will be pleased with what’s available (Cousins J., 1999).

1.2 Problem statement

The United Kingdom market covers a very big market of the catering industry. It has a very huge number of food and beverage organizations which offers environment of taking food and beverage related services. These organizations are high class five star hotels, three star hotels, specialty restaurants, fast food centres, out door caterers and transport catering. However, more specifically in the food and beverage services, the United Kingdom catering industry expend by sector for the specified selective catering services is not identified and consequently needs to be studied.

A clear understanding of specific selective outsourcing areas of IT related services which form part of the Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) would require one or more of the following:

1.2.1 Improving IT availability and service levels: this service helps improve the availability of IT customers’ environment and thus improve IT service levels.

1.2.2 Managing IT capacity and performance: this service helps anticipate, identify, monitor, and improve performance across IT infrastructures.

1.2.3 Planning and deploying new technologies: this service helps reduce the amount of time and resources required to deploy new systems.

1.2.4 Managing IT environments: this service helps customers manage a heterogeneous, multivendor environment.

The research question more specifically can be stated as follows: What percentage in the South African IT market by sector is spent on the specific above-mentioned selective outsourcing services?

The research also looks at other areas such as: How IT decision makers view outsourcing and the specified selective outsourcing services and more specifically the role that outsourcing plays in their sector and specific organizations.

1.3 Purpose of the research:
1.3.1 Primary Objective:

As the researcher is a hotel management graduate, being a hospitality student researcher completely involved into hospitality industry. Author has worked with different star category hotels and restaurants all over the world, and has been applying all educational, professional knowledge and skills in the workforce making the workforce fun at work. The concept of Fun at work has been followed by different companies but a very fine structure is taken by Jaypee group of hotels and Choice group of Hotels. There are different types of hotels and different themes of restaurants and bars that play a major role with human psychology. But the end product is all about value and satisfaction for the customer.

The central aim for this research is to define the influence that the consideration while menu planning could have on the Catering industry.

1.3.2 Secondry objective: To do a literature research on importance of the menu planning in catering industry.

1.4 Research Methodology:

The research is targeted at Top Food & Beverage management of the 5 star hotels, 4 star hotels and out door catering in United Kingdom , which is obtained form the Brewing, food and beverage industry (BFBI) listed top 100 Organizations. Researcher targeted people are top position Food and Beverage Managers, Assistant Managers and General Managers of different Star categories Hotels. “To survey is to question people and record their responses for analysis, and its strength of questioning as primary data collecting technique and its versatility” says Emory (1991).

1.4.1 Primary research

In order to achieve the objectives stated below, the author conducts the research on both the supply and demand side of the market, which includes IT market players, competitors and customers. The survey was carried out by means of telephonic interviews:

A list of the top 100 Johannesburg Stock Exchange listed companies was obtained from BMI-T, on which the interviews were conducted. For the purpose of this study and the time constraints associated with it, the author only conducted telephonic interviews. The benefits of the telephonic research are discussed in Chapter Three. 85 interviews were conducted within the author’s target market, which are the IT Company’s customers by vertical sector.

One questionnaire was designed, in conjunction with other management team members at the IT company by whom the author is currently employed, in the form of a workshop, and the results of the interviews were used. Chapter three outlines the research methodology used in this research. The survey compiles a view of the South African IT services industry according to the business segmentations identified by the author. This dimension distributes revenues according to vertical market sectors (sectors are based on the IDC vertical breakdown, and are clustered to reflect the targeted industry sectors). The survey was carried out on the top 100 JSE listed companies within the borders of South Africa. The questioning technique concentrated on the following, targeted at 45 customers.

1.5 Limitations and scope:

Basically this research has been based on Secondary data.

The research required many details and information but major constraint is the time factor, which is limiting the study.

Being a student, fund might be a limitation.

All the experience in this industry is out of United Kingdom so personal interviews with those hotels will be difficult to visit.

1.6. Discrimination of the research
Chapter two: Literature Review

This chapter includes the widest knowledge of the menu planning in catering industry. This chapter provides available current literature, data which have been used in this research to support with the qualitative analysis of the collective data. This chapter also gives full information and knowledge in depth at the literature review, in order to have clear view into the importance of the material to the problem statement and applied research methodology to be used.

Chapter three: Research Design and methodology

The research design or methodology is the plan and structure of the investigation to obtain answers to objectives says (Cooper and Shindler 1998:130). This chapter gives the full information about how researcher designs the research and what research method is going to be used by author. In this chapter aims and objective of the research will also be discussed, data gathering methods, data analysis and the end result with conclusion will discussed. The role of the research is to provide a method for obtaining those answers by inquiringly studying the facts, within parameters of the scientific method concludes (Leedy, 1989).

Chapter four: Research finding and analysis:

This chapter will give the result of the research based on gathered quantitative and qualitative data. Basically in this chapter researcher is going to declare the end result of the research. This chapter also includes the presentation and interpretation of the end result in different forms and pie chart explanations.

Chapter five: Conclusion and recommendation

The final chapter is focused on conclusions reached. Suggestions and recommendations are given to businesses interested in using the findings.

What is front office? Front office means that the sales personnel and corporate finance employees in a financial services company. Besides that, front office also means that sales, marketing and service departments that come in direct contact or communication with the customer example like a customers need to book a hotel room, then they must contact with the front office to realize that. Moreover, front office also needs to liaise with the back office such as administrative and housekeeping departments to maintain a two way flow of information. The front office of a hotel generally performs some basic activities such as: processing advance reservations, registering guests name, rooming guests, handling guest luggage, issuing room keys, security arrangements, providing information to the guest, and settling the accounts. In addition, front office service works in the round the clock mode, with daytime, evening and night shifts. Front office service specialists are required to have a good understanding of room booking process and take part in guest settlement. In additional, the front office may also serve as the home for office machinery. Common devices found in the front office include copiers, office computers, multi line phone, postage, and scale machines for mail. Hotels are almost always profit making concerns, and it is the rooms which provide most of the profit. Front office staff who are not sales oriented are not likely to be much use, this explain why we have devoted a section to the various ways in which staff can improve the yield.

Answer of Question 1:

Within a hotel organization they have some staff in front office department which is front office manager, assistant front office manager, front desk representative, night auditor, cashier, reservationist, and telephone operator.

Figure – Staff of Front Office

Front office Manager

The task of front office manager is to do all the duties of the front desk operation, example like, inter-department meeting communications, training the staff, order the staff to do their work, and plan the staff schedule. Front office managers usually interface with the guests, always greeting them when they are enters the establishment, generating sales and answering inquiries. By applying management principles, the front office manager works through the front office staff to communicate feelings of caring, warmth, efficiency and safety to every guest. Therefore, the front office manager should have strong communication skills. Depending on the organization, a front office manager might interface with all guests or only with those considered sensitive or important. The front office manager must has at he or she disposal the basic elements of effective management practice, such like equipment, rooms to be sold, budget, employees or staff, and sales opportunities. The manager must be strain after for coordinating those basic elements to achieve the profit goals set by the organization. In additional, other duties of the front office manager are include of:

Prepares monthly reports to the general manager

Assists the room division manager in formulation and implementation of front office policies and procedures

Reviews and approves all room moves and room rate changes to ensure they were necessary

Maintain the necessary stock of supplies in all front office areas, while controlling costs in these areas

Help the room division manager in forecasting room availability to ensure that the optimal level of occupancy is attained.

Assistant Front Office

The task of assistant front office manager is normally helps on the manager’s work. Besides that, the assistant front office manager, he or she will need to ensure the delivery of consistent quality customer service all the time. The assistant for the front office is a person who responsible for coordinating the front office operation. In additional, the responsibilities of assistant front office manager are to prepare and conduct any front office meetings, after that inform to the front office manager, other front office staff and resolve issues. Other duties of the assistant front office are:

Perform a daily check in and out procedures.

Provide information and direction or guidance to front office staff in order to achieve 100 % occupancy.

Complete monthly payroll and report to the front office manager.

Assist the manager in monitor labor costs to budget figures and assists in the day to day operation in the establishment.

Help the front desk during the busy period.

Train the front desk staff.

Front Desk Representative

The front desk representative can be found in many of the larger lodging establishment. Front office representative is one of the staff in hotels or motels, and are always the first person to greet incoming guests. The responsibilities of the front office representative are for taking incoming requests for rooms and noting special requests for service. When a new guest enter the establishment, the front office representative must be welcome and greeting them, register them, assign rooms and issue room keys or cards to the guests, and providing information to the guest. Moreover, the front office representative may also handle guest mail and luggage, keep an inventory of room reservations, answer telephones and take messages from the guests, deal with customer complaints or refer dissatisfied customers to a manager, and check daily record sheets, guest accounts, receipts and vouches using computerized or manual systems. Therefore, the front office representative must have a strong communication skill to serve the guest.

In small hotel, on the night, front office representative may assume the duties of assistant manager, night cashier, concierges or night auditor. As in large hotel, the duties front office representative may be divided among a few of desk clerks.

Night Auditor

Night auditor is known as the in house auditor. The responsible for the night auditor is for conducting audit and generating reports for management. Night auditor also ensures that all phone calls and guests coming to front office for different matters are properly addressed and taken care of the property. Besides that, night auditor balances the daily financial transactions. He or she must have a good or excellent grasp of accounting principles and the ability to resolve financial discrepancies. Night auditor is basically composed of some important tasks such like settling credit cards for the day with bank to ensure money transfer from the guest account to the hotel account. In addition, night audit may also follow the prescribe designed routines, which include to update the guest folio, perform account closing for the day, prepare and distribute daily bill to the guest, and last is prepare and distribute a range of report example like perpetual inventory of account receivable. Moreover, the person in this position should require experience as a desk clerk and have good communication with the controller.

Cashier

Cashier is the one of the front office department. The responsibilities of the cashier are processing guest checkouts and guest legal tender and also supply change for the guest when the guest enter the establishment. Besides that, the cashier also helps make the front desk workload manageable when it was full house, means that the hotel that has its entire guest rooms occupied and sometimes referred to as 100 percent occupancy. In additional, the cashier of the front office department is focused on handling of cash money. Other than that, front office cashier may also prepare and settle of guests accounts, administer the safe deposit boxes and provide a foreign currency exchange service.

Reservationists

The responsible of reservationists is to take reservation and providing information to the future guest about the facilities or rules of the hotel. The main tasks performed by reservationists are to giving friendly and excellent service to future guest when involved in telephone sales. Besides that, having deal with group bookings such like cancellations, changes, and rooming lists. In additional, the reservationists should answer all reservation phone calls, taking reservations, and dealing with reservations correspondence. Moreover, the person in this position must be checking and ensure that all equipment is still working properly and that the needed amount of supplies is on hand.

Telephone Operator

The telephone operator would not be face to face with guests of the hotel. As a telephone operator, he or she must have a friendly and courteous tone of voice to serve the guest. The responsibilities of telephone operator are to operate the hotel telephone switchboard and answer all calls with promptly and good manners. The main duty of a telephone operator is that of transferring calls from outside the hotel to the appropriate guest room. Besides that, they should be work closely with all departments on telephone related matter. Other than that, the telephone operator must be discreet with information received from callers. In additional, the person in this position must have full knowledge of all facilities and events in the hotel and answer inquiries about it.

Organization Chart of Front Office

Small Hotel

Front Desk Representative

Night Auditor

Front Office Manager

Bell Staff

Concierge

Desk Staff

Night Auditor

Guest Service

Reservation

Front Office ManagerMid Size Hotel

Front Office ManagerLarge Hotel

Assistant Front Office Manager

Elevator Operator

Night Auditor

Guest Service

Telephone operator

Cashier

Reservation Manager

Room key Clerk

Bell Staff

Concierge

Desk Staff

Conclusion

Front offices are the nerve center of a hotel and play a very important role in a hotel. The staff of front office will welcome the guests, greeting them, carry their luggage, rooming them, give them room keys or cards and mail, answer the question about the activities and facilities in the hotel, and check them out. Besides that, the front office may perform other tasks such like take guest details and allocate their room, take message to them, calculate guest’s bills and issue receipts upon payment, place guests possessions in a safe if requested, deal with enquiries and requested from guest and arrange accommodation for guests travelling to other destinations. In a small hotel, the duties may carry out by one people. However, in a large hotel, there may three to five people to carry out the duties. Each attendant is allocated a set of specific duties to perform. Due to front office is the first impression to the guest, so that, the staff of front office must be do their job as well as they can.

Question 2

Front office staffs must have certain skills to attract guests during the first impression. Write about Front Office staff skill in guest relations.

Introduction

Many experienced people who work in hotel agree that social skills are very important for front office job. What is social skill? Social skill is depends to how we get along with others person such like guest, family and friends. Social skill is most always as a skill that allows us to communicate, relate, and socialize with other people. Besides that, social skill means possessing the ability to achieve a specific objective efficiently. There are two types of social skill which are typing skill and cooking skill. Typing skill is the ability to produce acceptable quality text, without taking all day over it or spoiling a dozen sheets of paper in the process. Cooking skill is the ability that produces food that is both edible and appetizing. So that, social skills are communication with living things instead of tying skill, communicating with keyboard or mouse and cooking skills, communicating kitchen ingredients. Besides the two skills, it still has other objective to achieve, but have to employ words, expressions, and gestures. Therefore, social skill is involves combining these elements in such a way as to influence other people’s attitudes and behavior by using those elements. In additional, social skill are same like other kind of skills which can only developed through practice or training. This practice need to take the form of unscripted face to face conversations. Moreover, good social skills include things such as compromising, cooperating, and respecting the personal space of others.

Answer of Question 2

The people who work as a front office employees, they must know and realize some certain skills, in order to attract the guest during the guest enter the establishment and give them a good first impression. The skills should front office staffs learn are in the figure below:

Figure – The skills should front office staff learn

Behaviour

Behaviour means that the way that somebody behaves and their attitudes, especially towards to other person. For instance, a guest enter an establishment, then the reservationists will welcome and greeting them before start dealing with the guest, such like saying ‘Hello, welcome, May I Help you?’ Besides that, the receptionist should speak out the phrase and tone correctly, example like communicate feelings of caring, warmth, efficiency and safety to every guest. In additional, behavior is that the front office staff to go on when they are meeting with the guest for the first time, especially they are don’t know anything about the guest in advance. Moreover the receptionist should be neatly attire, nail must be clean and a suitable hairstyle. Therefore, the receptionist has the good impression and behavior to the guest.

Self-Presentation

Self-presentation means that the dressing and grooming of the receptionist. If the receptionists wearing neatly dressing and grooming, then the guest will know more about the receptionists before having a conversation. Besides that, many hotels needs their staff to wear their uniform neatly, suitable hairstyle and the nail of staff must be clean. For instance, the staff of front office department must be wear their uniform or formal attire neatly; in food and beverage department, the chef should wear apron, hats, pants and their nail should be clean and can’t be so long; in security department, the guard should wear the security guard uniform with neatly and which there is a weapon ad wisely. If the hotel staff give the guest bad impression, then the guest won’t patron the hotel again. Therefore, the staff of the front office must make sure that their attire is clean and neatly. If the receptionist is dirty, then the guest will think that other areas of the hotel are also same dirty.

Position

Position means that the place where the front office staff such like butler is situated. Where the staff stand is very important, not only in relation to equipment such like the desk, but also in relation to the people that the staffs are dealing with the guest. Besides that, the staff of front office has their own area call ‘personal space’. The concept of position can be taken further. Whenever the guest find themselves sitting or standing directly opposite with each other with a desk or table in between, and divided the barrier into two equal ‘territories’. When the receptionist slapped the registration form in front of a guest and then leant forward to see the guest filling it out. These kinds of action or behavior are totally wrong and called rude and this may causes the invasion that causes people feel uncomfortable.

Posture

Posture means that the position how the front office staff stand or sit in relation to the guest. Besides that, when facing some people, normally indicates interest and learning forward shows even greater interest. Other than that, some action such like using our limb to attract the people that we interested or we can use it as barriers to shut out the people we are nervous and scare. When the receptionists leant forward for the desk and watch the guest filling form, certainly, but even then he or she kept arms folded which show that the staff is not very anxious to help the guest.

Gesture

Gesture means that a way of sending signals by moving parts of our bodies especially our hands, arms and heads. Gesture which has the closest related to the posture. Hands are totally important. The open palm is a sign of friendship for the older age person and also an indication of honesty. Means that, many hand-to-face gestures such like touching others nose or mouth will bring out negative feeling or feeling, example like scare, worry, or doubt. For instance, when a guest enter a establishment and asking the receptionist something, and then the receptionist propping one’s head on a hand often indicates boredom. The guest will feeling that the receptionist is not respects he / she, and then the guest would not patron the hotel again.

Expression

Expression means a look on a person face that showing their thoughts and feelings. As a front office staff, they must give the good first impression towards to the guest. Besides that, the range of possible expressions but some we can generally recognize when seeing it. For instance, smiling with the mouth curves moving upwards and the eyes crinkle a little bit at the corner. So that, the guest will feeling worried or nervous which stare to them with a blank and even get greeted by a boredom expression. Therefore, the front office staff should serious when they are serves the guest.

Eye Contact

In front office department, eye contact is a very important thing, because when looking at somebody normally carries not only interest but liking as well. If a person is preventing the gaze of the others who is talking, that means the person might talk or giving dishonest answer. Moreover, there are three types of direction on looking, which include: business gaze, social gaze and intimate gaze. Business gaze means concentrates on the eyes and forehead in order to maintain a serious and rational atmosphere. Social gaze is the movement of the other person’s eyes and mouth which showing a better interest in reactions. Intimate gaze means moves between the other person’s eye and body, and signals rather more than mere social interest. The receptionists must be avoided the intimate gaze. So that, the receptionists must understand the type of gaze and use it correctly.

Speech

Speech is very important in front office department, because it is the clearest way to express the interest of the staff in the guest welfare by using phrases, example like ‘Good Morning’ and ‘Can I help you’. Besides that, call the guest ‘Sir’ or ‘Madam’ or just call their name directly, and the guest will be feeling the staff is respect they. Obviously, if using the guest name will have a good memory, because that shows that the staff recognizes the guest as an individual and just an unnamed guest. The way to know the guest name is take a quick look at the guest’s registration card.

Non verbal Speech Element

Non verbal speech elements means the tone that the staff of the hotel using to talk with the guest. Word can be speak out warmly, quickly, slowly, and efficiency. The staff can bring it all out together, or can insert a pause example like ‘Good Morning…sir’, this cases show that the staff is not sure about the guest deserves. Besides that, the staff can lift their tone a little at the end and turn the phrase into a question such as ‘Good Morning…sir’. So that, the staff who work in front office department should know how to use their tone suitable.

Conclusion

At last, social skills is very important to front office work. Good social skills are critical to successful functioning in life. Besides that, social skills enable us to know what to say, how to behave in diverse situations and how to make the choice correctly. In additional, the staff of front office such like receptionist, can use those skill to calm down some agitate guest. Other than that, people with good social skills are generally more friends compare with the persons who are poor with social skill.

Air Arabia is the first low cost carrier in the Middle East and North Africa region. They are the first international airline of the Emirate of Sharjah and the second officially approved national carrier of the United Arab Emirates. An LCC or low-cost airline is an airline which is able to offer generally low flight fares by eliminating many traditional passenger services. The concept was incepted in the United States before spreading to Europe in the early 90’s. A low cost carrier’s business model is typically based on cost cuts such as a single passenger class, a single type of airplane (commonly the Airbus A 320 or Boeing 737), and the absence of ‘free’ in-flight catering and other additional services.

The company commenced operations in October 2003 and is modeled after leading American and European low-cost airlines. Initially operating with two new Airbus A320 aircraft, Air Arabia’s fleet has increased to 21 Airbus A320 aircraft flying to over 57 destinations with more significant growth planned. Based at Sharjah International Airport, Air Arabia customers enjoy the benefits of access to Sharjah, Dubai and other Emirates, fast check-in processes, low congestion, friendly airport staff, as well as access to other commercial carriers served at the airport. Air Arabia pioneered the LCC model in the Middle East, being the first to introduce it successfully in the region. Air Arabia began with a mission to revolutionize air travel in the region, much in the same way that the introduction of low cost carriers revolutionized travel in the US, Europe and Asia, by offering good value for money, and a safe, reliable operation. Air Arabia, as a business, aims to be known for its low fares, growing business volume and profitability, highest operational standards, a motivated work force and efficient management.

Organizational Structure

The management of Air Arabia follows a functional structure. The departments are divided up according to different functions like sales, finance, etc. This kind of structure is very efficient due to its flexibility. Each department Head is aware of its subordinates and hence reduces the possibility of burden on workers. Their open-door policy allows any employee to discuss issues with their respective department Heads. Recently, the CEO, Adel A. Ali was awarded the Best CEO in the Airline industry.

Objectives of Air Arabia:
Mission of the business

“To revolutionize air travel in the region through an innovative business approach offering superb value for money and a safe, reliable operation To achieve this we will:

Be known for our low fares

Grow our business profitably

Build motivated multi-functional teams

Demonstrate the highest operational standards

Manage our costs ruthlessly”

Business Objectives

Fleet expansion of over 50 aircraft by 2015

Establishing at least 1 more hub to link the whole range destinations from the Arab World to Africa and Europe

Key Business Strategies

Air Arabia has the following 4 business strategies to align growth with its business objectives

Air Arabia is continuing implementing a continued low cost model by doing the following:

A – Offering the lowest fares in the Middle East region on a profitable basis while staying in a profitable structure.

B- Focusing on lowering the costs.

C-Introducing continued operational efficiencies.

D- Offering point to point service, which maximizes the aircraft utilization model.

2- Maintain the leader position and stay profitable:

A-Increase the flying frequency of existing destinations and add more destination routes for the Indian sub-continent, MENA region and the Eastern Mediterranean region.

B- Expand fleet within the next few years.

C- Expand through new hub(s)

D- Launching the low cost “Centro Rotana” hotel in April 2010 – this hotel will complement Air Arabia’s brand as a low cost airline, as it includes low cost standard room and suits.

3- Seeking new strategic acquisition-opportunities by evaluating opportunities in their target regions.

4- Grow complimentary ancillary operations:

In the above-mentioned subsidiary joint ventures, Air Arabia proposes to improve the following:

Expand the operations to have more control on costs.

Enhance profitability.

Improve quality.

Improve reliability of services.

Stakeholders:

Internal:

Shareholders

Pilots

Cabin Crews

Ticketing Staff

Employees

External:

Customers & the community

Government of Sharjah & Department of Civil Aviation

Suppliers: ABELA Caters

Aircraft Manufacturers

Tools and techniques:

Risk identification processes

High Oil Prices

As about a third of the cost of company, oil prices represent the largest and most dangerous threat to an LCC. Air Arabia lacks a formal fuel hedging policy, and must be cautious of the implications of only exercising a private policy

Competitor market share

Nas Air and Al Jazeera pose the most significant competitor threats to Air Arabia, as these are the two comparables that have the most flights to and from the UAE. A leading national airliner, Emirates Airlines, has also announced plans for a low-cost division, which will pose a significant threat in the future.

Overdependance on Sharjah hub

Since the creation of Air Arabia was in part a response to increase air traffic in SIA, flight schedules depend highly on the Sharjah hub, as well as overall reliance on leniency from the airport itself. Also, the centralized flight structure requires a transit stop at SIA if flying between two foreign locations, which is a major complaint of Air Arabia customers. This is also a limitation for travelers from faraway Emirates. Air Arabia can develop an adequate transport system to accommodate this need.

Limited capacity of planes

Air Arabia has a fleet of 21 aircraft of a single type: Airbus A320. Due to this absolute reliance, a delay in aircraft deliveries has large impact on operations (Prospectus, 2007).

Operational delays

Another major customer complaint is the number of flight delays customers’ face.

Lack of formal fuel hedging policy

Air Arabia prefers not to disclose its fuel hedging policy. As discussed in the ‘Threats’ later, this represents a major weakness and unfavorable exposure for Arabia.

Highly leveraged

Any airliner will have a substantial segment of their liabilities in lease obligations, as many if not most planes are under lease contracts. Air Arabia leases 18 out of its fleet of 21, resulting in high exposure to the variable components of these lease contracts. This exposure could have very significant implications in adverse macroeconomic conditions on the profitability and operations of Air Arabia.

risk assessment processes

Integration risk management

In Air Arabia integration of risk management is extremely important. The framework of the risk management integration usually scrutinizes the association between the activities of service delivery departments and support functions.

(BAS YE 6 POINTS PARAPHARSE KAR AUR DO PARAGRAPH BANA KAR DEY DEY LAMBE WALEYSIRF 3000 HUNDRED WORDS AURaˆ¦aˆ¦REFERENCE BHI DAAL DE JAHAN JAHAN SEY TUNE CHEEZEIN LI HAI)

incorporates the management of risk process into strategic management planning

supports Internal Audit by increasing the effectiveness of the control environment

Improved decision taking and strategic direction.

Established links between the high level aims/objectives and operational activities.

Alignment of strategic and business objectives.

Improved management understanding of the impact of risk on opportunities and practices.

Revenue is dependent on capacity, market segment, duration, supply and demand. To manage revenue means to manage the source of income, by doing which can maximize the profit. Furthermore, the purpose of revenue management is to provide right products to right customers at right time at right price. The illustration below showed the concept of revenue manager:

In this article there will be four areas of revenue management being discussed: restaurant, function room, hotel room and golf course. After reading this article, you will understand how revenue management can be applied to these areas, and what it will affect.

Restaurant is a perfect candidate for applying Revenue Management because of its five elements: fixed capacity, demand inventory, time-variable demand, appropriate cost structure and segmentable customers. There are two traditional ways to manage revenue in restaurants: duration control and pricing strategy.

Duration control helps to maximize the revenue, it consists uncertainty of meal durations and arrivals. In order to analyze and forecast meal durations, history data should be collected from reservations and POS system. Observing the guests during different meal periods will help to have more accurate information. After analyzing and forecasting meal duration, some strategies can be applied to control it. Those strategies include menu design, service process, staffing, improving communication, external approaches and reduce change over time. In addition, arrivals also needed to be controlled because of inconstant customer behavior. Some arrival-related problems may occur for example no shows, short shows and late shows. These can be prevented or avoided by overbooking, applying maximum hold time, taking deposits and forecasting. Reservation strategies and seating methods can help controlling duration. For example, no reservations available for peak hours can prevent having empty tables; call-ahead seating during busy times can avoid having empty seats.

Pricing strategy could be based on different elements. Common strategies include cost based pricing, competitive pricing and demand based pricing. Cost based pricing is setting the sale price based on cost, for instance sale price equals three times of cost. Competitive pricing is considering the prices of competitors’ products when setting a price. Demand based pricing means when demand goes up, the price goes up as well, for example higher dinner prices for weekends. Rate Fences are always being used when a restaurant apply demand pricing strategy. A rate fence simply means a certain price provides to a certain people. There are many ways to introduce rate fences to a restaurant for instance buy one get one free, happy hour, coupon, higher price for window seats and so on. While setting a price of a product, business ethics should always be considered. A fair price makes customers happy. Here is a way to make sure the price is fair: compare the price with competitors but not fixing it with them or go much higher than their price.

The best way to practice Revenue Management in restaurants is RevPASH, which stands for Revenue per Available Seat-Hour. It gives a clear picture of revenue made by the covers, and combines with the two methods mentioned above. Simply three ways to increase RevPASH: sell more covers, increase average check and increase seat occupancy.

There are five steps to develop Revenue Management in restaurants: establish baseline, understand the causes, develop strategy, implement strategy and monitor results. To establish a baseline means to collect information on arrival patterns, RevPASH patterns, unconstrained demand, meal duration, customer preferences, seat occupancy, table occupancy, and so on. Some tools can help to understand the causes of those data, like fishbone diagram and bottleneck analysis. Strategies that have been mentioned above could be applied to a restaurant according to its specific problems or needs. When implementing the strategies, it is important to communicate with employees, to let everyone understand the strategies in order to enhance the productivity, efficiency and as well as ensuring the outcome. After implementing the strategies, the outcome should be monitored consistently. It helps to determine whether the strategies are useful or not and if there is anything that can be improved, monitoring RevPash performance, dining time, and compare to baseline performance help to measure the results.

Revenue management in room:

In hotels, the goal of Revenue Management is to sell the right room (types of rooms such as standard, luxury or sea-view, etc.) to the right customers (from a particular segment) at the right time (depending on demand) and for the right price (when customer wants room).

The necessary attributes of hotel revenue management include segmented market which hotel bases on to manage the tradeoffs between a higher room rate for business customers, and a lower room rate for leisure customers. Business customers are willing to pay a higher price holding a flexible room which can be book at last minute and leisure customers are willing to give up in exchange for a cheaper room. Fixed capacity means the number of rooms in hotels is impossible to increase or decrease. The appropriate cost structure means the fixed cost is higher than the variable cost. Perishable inventory means rooms can’t be stored, and can lose its value forever for that night if it is unoccupied. Demand fluctuation which accords with seasons and day of the week, which affect the room pricing process, for example, in peak season, the hotel can increase its room rate to maximize revenue, while during valley season, reducing rate is the best way to increase utilization. (Admin, 2010)

Revenue management is introduced in room as RevPar, which stands for revenue per available room. It is a measure of how the how the hotel has been able to fill room during low season and high season with appropriate for rates to maximize the profit. To achieve the most effectivity of RevPar, revenue manager need collect historical data from hotel and consider another hotels to implement it.

There are two factors that need to be controlled carefully, including duration control and demand based pricing. For duration control, revenue manager can reduce arrival uncertainty by credit card guarantee, calling customers the day before to confirm the guest reservation and arrival time; overbook rooms to maximize occupancy in order to fill up the no shows, and if there is no show, the revenue manager will have penalties for guest like charging the first night room rate; call the night before to in-house guests to verify their departure time. Besides, there is a money penalty to the guest if they depart earlier. Otherwise, to minimize the duration uncertainty, revenue manager should forecast demand accurately based on historical data. For the pricing, most hotels have the categories of pricing which determine how much customer are going to be charged and who are willing to pay that price. Price are determined by the following three ways: Competitive pricing which the price is establish based on comparing with competitors; reference pricing which the price is lower than the hotel’s main competing brand; and demand based pricing, which price is set up depending on season, or guest’s demand such as view of room, length of stay.

Those prices which decided who are willing to pay are introduced in revenue management as rate fences. Actually, rate fence is a condition somebody has to meet to get a particular price; on the other hand, it’s also a tool to maximize revenue for hotel, because the hotel takes the ultimate advantage of the rooms’ condition. In general, revenue manager classify rate fences into physical and logical fences correlating the different market segment, and the condition as well, as shown in the table below:

Nowadays, customers consider that hotels set the room rate based on market segment is unfair, such as charging different prices for the same room with different types of customer. “Mindshare” is one of the biggest challenges for revenue manager and mindshare means that customers are more knowledgeable in the way that hotel set the room rate. Therefore, they examine rate fences as logical, transparent, clear communicated and fixed to generate short-term profits, and create long-term customer loyalty.

Revenue management in Golf course:

In the golf industry, it is also suitable for practicing revenue management because the condition of fixed capacity, predictable demand and perishable inventory. The land, equipment and facility are fixed capacity; the investment on land, facility and maintenance are incredibly high. The demand can be segment by different season and time. It could be forecast by using historical data, customer profile and arrival pattern. The tee times are perishable inventory. Once the product is not sold, we cannot recall the losses that made from that period. The main sources of revenue come from club membership fees, golf lessons, golf clubs, cart fees and green fees. To practice revenue management in their business, they would need to have different strategies to increase revenue. For example, Duration and arrival control, Discount allocation, Marshalls, Peer pressuring by posting playing time and Different pricing.

To restrict the arrival, the company can set up arrival policies to minimize the risks of no show, late show and short show. To control duration, they can use Marshalls and Posting Playing time as strategies to pressure or remind the guest how long they have been playing.

The other strategy is having different prices in different times and course. The company can provide Time of the day based pricing according to the Hot and Cold time during a day and provide Membership fees and senior prices to the customer. Discounts can offer to big party, ages and the time of reservation. The discount rate can apply based on reservation time and location.

Disney Golf in Orlando applied revenue management to its golf club. First, they have segmented the market to manage the availability of tee times by the party size, business people, and different group for example, locals, foreign. They provide discount and packages to the groups, members of the club and employees. They even provide discount to beginning level golfer.

When they forecast the high-demand day comes, they will close lower revenue buckets for all or part of that day and selected profitable course or customer to reach the highest profitable customers and use “up-selling” to motivate consumer to spend more money.

The company said it is so important to know 6W, who, what, where, when, why and how. They use a very attractive way to collect the customer data. The customers who give their personal data and opinion will receive discount where appropriate. By using this strategy, they increased the customer loyalty.

Since Disney Golf implemented revenue management in 2001, it is a great success to the company.

Lastly, when company set up a price, it has to be logical, transparent and fix. Consumers have an acceptable price to most products in their minds. Company should always communicate and maintain relationship with the consumer. It is an easy way to know their opinion.

Do not against the law by fixing the price with the competition and price gouging which setting up the price higher than the fair price.

Revenue management in function space:

Firstly, the function space can’t be extended so that the maximum capacity is fixed. However, the function space can be adjusted since hotels apply air wall which can separate a function room to be 2 or more meeting rooms. Secondly, same as rooms, restaurant, and golf course, if the function room doesn’t sell out it means the hotel loses the chance of making revenue- perishable product. Third, there is variable and uncertain demand. Even though customer pays the deposit, they might break the contract. Furthermore, the price sensitive varies from people to people. Lastly, function room pricing structure are setting higher than it should be in case customer demands to cut down the price or a special package. Thus, hotel will not lose money in business.

Hotel will send contract which includes time of duration, price, quantity of customers and related agreements after guests confirm with sales to ensure both parties’ right. There are 2 rights of decisions that hotel hold on hand- price and duration.

Pricing a function space need to consider the rooms sales and F&B sales. Same as rooms and restaurant revenue management, hotel apply rate fence by physical and non-physical reasons. Physical rate fence can work by facilities and equipment, location and ceiling height. For example, price will be set higher in the high technical function room compare with the others. Non-physical rate fences will determine by booking pace, transaction characteristics, frequency of reservation and timing. Hotels mostly offer special meeting package with two different prices in a day and different price between weekday and weekend since price based on demand. Generally, there is higher demand in the evening day part then afternoon section. However, customers might think it is unfair to get higher price because of different day part.

The second element that hotel doing good at control is duration. The duration can be predicted by customer history in Delphi. Hotel normally asks guests refundable deposit and prepayment in order to prevent no-show or cancellation since the duration uncertainty. Furthermore, if guests hold the function room longer then the agreement time, they might have to pay extra fees since hotel need more people to turn down the room.

In order to apply revenue management in function space, hotel need to set up the baseline and understand the drivers of performance which needs to consider customer profile, revenue contribution, seasonal demand history, ConPAST, current market environment, and demand behavior of segments. The next step is to develop strategy like pricing, special package and so on. Following the point mentioned above hotel need to implement the strategy properly and also monitor the outcome.

According to hotel’s forecasting, hotel will keep the function room for the most profitable customers for each function room in high demand period. However, hotel won’t say obviously that you need to pay higher amount of money in order to get this function room. Actually, people feel it is unethical to reject customers if you are waiting for higher contribution customers. Nowadays, hotel sets the minimum charge for each function room. As long as both party make agreement and sign the contract, hotel don’t have rights to sale the reserved function room to other people.

Conclusion

Revenue Management is a perfect tool to maximize profit in any organizations. Restaurant, Golf, Function Space and Hotel rooms, they all have the same condition of fixed capacity, predictable demand and perishable inventory, they all can implement revenue management to maximize profit in their way.

In order to achieve the goal and objective, the strategies have to be logical, circumspect with every single historical data and decision making from your experience.

In recent years, Vietnam has taken great steps in the development of tourism. Tourism is promoted widely by the government because it provides the potential for job opportunities, thus producing income for the country and became a source of revenue for the government. However, the tourism industry can also be seen as a critical force, causing negative outcomes such as congestion, the loss of natural environmental and landscapes and the cultural degradation (Bui, 2009). These problems are becoming an issue towards tourism industry of Vietnam due to the lack of effective planning and proper planning of tourism development. Tourism is claimed to be one of the key elements towards the country’ economy development with particular attention being placed on infrastructure development, human resources, environmental issues, product development and marketing strategies by the Tourism Master Plan 2001 -2010 (Vietnam Embassy, 2011). Yet, evidence demonstrates a critical need for identifying sustainable ways of using the tourism resources by avoiding a voracious exploitation of the country’s patrimony as well as to ensure the beneficial trade exchange in the international marketplace and substantial long-term socio-economic benefits. This report seeks to explore how the sustainable tourism development in Vietnam affects its economic, social and environmental with an emphasis placed on the challenges that appear along this process.

2.0 Overview of sustainable tourism in Vietnam

Vietnam has a high market potential in the tourism industry with foreign investors showing interest in the country (Mok and Lam, 2000). The introduction of an economic reform policy, doi moi encouraged the establishment of normal political with other countries by lifting the restrictions on investment by the private sector. As a result, Vietnam has experienced a massive growth in the service industry since the Asian financial crisis in 1998. The improving visa policy, the limited transportation networks and the restricted marketing (i.e. tourism promotion budget around S$1m about a tenth the size of the budgets of Singapore) are the three main considerations of accessibility to Vietnam (Suntikul, Butler and Airney, 2008).

According to the Vietnam National Administration of Tourism (2010), international visitors to Vietnam reached 449,570 arrivals in 2010, increasing by 19% over the same period last year. The total international arrivals in 2010 reached 5,049,855 representing a 34.8% growth. In terms of market share, China was ranked top, with the largest influx of visitors into Vietnam in 2010, while the South Korea and Japan, at second and third, also dominated the market. Such a number exceeds the carrying capacity in Vietnam, including both its tourist infrastructure and environment and risks serious overcrowding in some cities of attraction e.g. Hue, environmental pollution, degradation of monuments and the collapse of the tourist industry as the result of unsustainable tourism development (Bui, 2009).

Since 1995, Vietnam National Administration of Tourism (VNAT) urged the tourism industry to focus on the development of facilities and infrastructure to encourage more investment, while developing a unique tourism product (Vietnam Embassy, 2008). It is also stated that the unsustainable nature of the sector both in terms of use of local resources and tourists’ arrivals (limited repeat visitors) , which is also reflected by tourism destination being exploited carelessly and by traditional cultures being affected and changed by tourist arrivals. In other words, there is a need to address the Vietnamese tourism sites that have been exploited without proper planning, caring and investing take place in tourism facilities, the conservation and restoration of values of culture, history and landscapes.

The ever-increasing annual number of international and domestic tourists coming to Vietnam has been a significant encourage to the industry in its efforts to promote tourism business development in a sustainable manner. (Luong, 2005b)

3.0 Issues faced in sustaining tourism development in Vietnam

3.1 Weak institutional practices

Vietnam tourism development is dominated by small-medium enterprise (SMEs) that facing weak institutional practice, low financial capacity and lack of attention about environmental conservation and protection (Bui, 2009). These firms are a distinct group with diverse of needs and associated impacts. The problem in infrastructure and improper solid waste practices and sewage produced from the hundreds of tourism enterprises and the mass market of visitors has caused a serious environment pollution and degradation of cultural heritage. Also, there is a lack of clear stands and procedures to examine its strategies in the development of tourism and policies planning. As a result, the VNAT had to reconsider many of its development targets segments for Vietnam tourism industry in the 21st century.

The urge to earn foreign exchange and the lack of a strong institutional fundamental to effectively manage environmental resources had led to many example of unsustainable development (Thang, 2004). The domestic private and international sectors have been supported the development of sustainable tourism in Vietnam because it believed that this new market-oriented mechanism brings with it economic benefits. It can be showed as the participation of the local and international stakeholders in sustainable tourism development is only concentrated in the some popular tourist attraction for e.g. SAPA which believed to generate extra revenue by ensuring a clean, green and attractive tourism destination image. Meanwhile, Vietnam government tried to devote its attention to the management of the environment because the fears a loss of political control over the tourism industry due to its rapid development. Yet, the capacity at district government is very low to cater to need in the huge market of sustainable tourism development.

Despite that, each group of stakeholders has different views and concern on their responsibility towards the future of tourism depending on the amount of investment that they spend in each tourism destination. SMEs are often seemed to be more concerned towards their return in investment than the overall impact of their operations on the environment and socio-economic sphere (Cooper, 1997; Briassoulis, 2002; Thang 2004). The participation of SMEs are crucial in creating the modalities in strengthen institutional practice and management that enable sustainable tourism development to success. Adoption of sustainable tourism project requires strong institutional frameworks that can overcome shortage in the potential of the market to ease tourism enterprises especially the SMEs towards more sustainable business practices

Other than that, one of the challenges is that the policies and law system are inadequate, inconsistent and not in accordance with the reality of tourism development; there is also a lack of understanding and acknowledgement of international rules and principles (Lloyd, 2003). The weak institutional framework for the tourism industry in Vietnam has characterized by a fairly complex system of policies, laws, ordinances and regulation, issued by line ministries, agencies and provincial governments (Lloyd, 2003; Nhan Dan, 2006). It is stated that many existing laws and ordinances are incomplete, not only in terms of coverage but also in terms of lacking documents to guide for implementation (VNAT, 2005; Sam et al., 2001; Nhan Dan, 2006).

Thus, it is crucial to strengthen the need for sustainable tourism planning and management by emphasizing its structure and processes, that has not yet been fully explored and understood in many developing countries e.g. Vietnam. The strategies for sustainable tourism development made by developing countries often tend to be encumbered by the lack of understanding of the complexity of the tourism industry by stakeholders and a lack of strong institutional frameworks needed for their implementation (Bui, 2000). Thus, the corporation of an incorporated tourism development approach for a region emphasized that sustainable tourism development needs a well established institutional practice that enables the participation and co-ordination of stakeholders.

3.2 Threats to the local community in terms of social-economy factor

3.2.1 Employment for locality

The Vietnam tourism industry can also have less positive impacts in providing job opportunities for local communities. The tourism industry might reduce of jobs when national parks, forest, rivers or even rice fields become part of the tourism product/experience whereby local government have set buffer zones in many tourist resorts such as national parks, natural reserves and monuments in order to protect them. As a result, local people are forced to move out of, and thus restricted their living practices in these areas. When tourism development displaces and affects local villagers in this way, it can destroy their traditional employment practices (De, 2002; Ha, 2005). It is worthless to reduce labor costs in some tourism-related services since the private sector has made considerable effort to increase the efficiency of tourism business operation.

Another important feature of Vietnam’s tourism industry is that it is differentiated by small- and medium-scale tourism enterprise. Even though the country has taken actions to decentralize its diversity products and management system, yet the increased involvement of privately owned small enterprises in the tourism industry has resulted in slow employment growth. As most of these enterprises are in family based, thus their overall contribution to national employment has been small.

3.2.2 Arise of income equality in rural areas

From the social issues perspective, rapid population growth, inadequate basis services of education and health care and social stratification have emerged widely in Vietnam even though the country has made much effort to use its economic success for social improvements (Bui, 2009). According to Kokko and Tingvall (2005), Vietnam has faced the rising of income inequality over the past decade because some regions are improving and growing tremendously faster than others: average income is rising faster in the cities that have higher concentration of tourists than in rural areas whereby there are significant differences between incomes in lowland areas compared with the remote and mountainous areas which has less concentration of tourist.

Another example to look into this issue is through a popular tourism destination in Vietnam, Kim Bong Village is capable to attract the attention of tourist because of its scenic riverside landscape and traditional carpentry workshops. Yet, visitors only tend to stop by in Kim Bong village and undertake a short trip. Despite the tourism potential of the village, Kim Bong does not benefit from the development of tourism and is hindered by the underdeveloped infrastructure. As a result, a high incidence of poverty and a lack of decent employment opportunities are direct consequences of these drawbacks.

3.2.3 Lack of skilled human resources

The Asian-Tour project ToR highlighted that there is a lack of professional and skilled staff working in tourism sector. While it is easy to start working in the tourism sector, the long term success depends on the satisfaction of the tourist as client. The problem is especially arising when working with poor local communities, who show a lot of hospitality but do not really know how to serve international visitors. The cultural and language differences are constraining the tourism development in Vietnam.

Despite, Vietnam having more than 60 tourism training centers that offer university, vocational and postgraduate training, and many graduates from these centers fail to satisfy their employers’ requirements (Canh 2002; Luong, 2005b). The quality of tour operators, tour guides and hotels operating staff are at bare minimum of acceptable service levels for foreign tourist which reflected the poor quality standard of tourism training programmes offered in Vietnam. Due to the teaching standard and training programmes vary in each training institution has resulted a considerable of inconsistency in the used of textbooks and curricula. Tour companies claimed that tourism graduates are often poorly equipped with the skills and knowledge they needed in working in the sector, whereby there are insufficient historical and cultural understanding, lack of hospitality skills and poor language proficiency (Vietnam Cultural Profile, 2005). It is stated that the lack of qualified local tour guides who speak Asian languages such as Japanese, Chinese and Korean is of particular concern to the VNAT, given their current focus on this area because tourist from China, South Korean and Japan are the top three countries that have visited Vietnam in 2010. For this reason, the industry has to recruit skillful tour guides from outside the sector and trained in post.

3.2.4 Lack of participation of local communities

Despite that, the local communities and their leader are rarely included in the strategy, practices and policy making processes relating to sustainable tourism development project which affects their access and business activities to tourism resources. The level of participation of tourism enterprises and the local communities in the control of operation in tourism activities is constrain (De, 2002; Ha, 2005; Dinh et al., 2006). Despite that, however, from the local community’ point of view, a development and institutional practices might result in a loss of access to tourism resources and unfavorable social activities in the local economy. (Lipscombe & Thwaites, 2003). It can be seen that the major constraints to sustainable tourism development in Vietnam is due to the insufficient of communication and co-operation between various authorities, especially with central government developing policies for tourism planning, marketing and promotion of tourism.

3.3 Week awareness of planning and development of tourism facilities

It is undeniable that the tourism industry has contributed massively to the economic growth of Vietnam, but in return it has also caused environmental degradation, biodiversity deterioration and the other adverse impacts (Canh, 2002; Lam, 2002). The exploit of natural resources in the supply of tourists’ facilities can lead to conflicts over resources between the locality and the tourism industry. For example, the Tam Dao tourism site in Vinh Phuc province has become degraded; areas of Trang Tien, opera house or Bac Co in inner of the capital city should have planned into flower gardens rather building of Hilton hotel; beaches in Ha Long Bay of Quang Ninh province has been imposed by Hoang Gia hotel project; Van Phong gulf in Khanh Hoa province is about to become an uncultivated bay because of a shipbuilding plant (Le Minh, 2010)

Deforestation and intensified use of the resources can also result in environmental pollution and erosion. Pressures on the environment and tourism resources generated by the development of tourism in Vietnam are excessive. Often, those impacts are due to improper planning, negligent behavior by tourism-related services and tourists, and a lack of education and awareness towards the impacts by many localities.

In Vietnam, there have been many national parks cater to both conserve biodiversity as well as tourism attraction. It is risky for mass tourism participates in national parks with fragile forest ecosystems. In addition to the stresses put on the local environment through accommodating the needs and comforts of these tourists: communication routes, provision fuel wood and waste disposal services all put a large stress on the ecology (De, 2002; Luong, 2005a).

3.3.1 Poor infrastructure

The poor public infrastructure in Vietnam is a major issue to hotel and tourism. Roads are poor with many potholes and the adequate transport links between the north and south parts of the country. Floods in roads after downpours can be easily seen in tourist destination sites, causing a great deal of inconvenience and bad tourism image to tourists. The railway system is weak and substandard. Trains, still using steam engines, are slow of poor quality. Poor transportation networks and facilities have impeded travel by international tourist within the country (Connie and Terry, 1998). The system infrastructure is poorly developed whereby the transportation, tourism services, information system, telecommunication development are limited in terms of quality.

It is important to note that, because of a lack of proper national tourism promotion strategy and its poor infrastructure Vietnam struggles to compete as a tourism destination with some of its more developed neighbors such as Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia (VNAT, 2005).

3.4 Lack of diversified and sustainable tourism product

There are many articles appearing on the national newspaper Viet Nam News, emphasizing on tourism potential, development and target markets that became an important source of income to the country which resulted the efforts in advertising and promoting the image of Vietnamese tourism in international networks, and at the same time improving the quality of the current tourism products and services. Yet, minimum attentions have been placed towards the requirement of fundamental diversification in identifying and packaging of a tourism product to cater the different needs and expectations by the domestic, the short-haul Asian and the long-haul European and other international markets. It seems that tourism development in Vietnam can be seen through the construction of more high-rise hotel buildings as well as the emerged of international hotel chain to cope with increasing numbers of visitors, with the lack of attention towards the planning and management of those natural resources that attracted tourists in the first place.

3.5 Weak destination image

Those working in the tourism sector argue that the VNAT must implement more promotion towards the country in overseas than just presenting itself at selected international travel trade shows. Currently, the Vietnamese tourism industry has a ratio of 15 percent in repeated international arrivals, which is rather low compared with Singapore, Thailand or Indonesia (Thanh, 2007). The increasing conjunction of the industry into the regional and international tourism market has imposed a strong pressure for Vietnamese tourism enterprises (Bui, 2009). The standards in terms of marketing, branding and promotion have not met the demand and compete in Vietnam’s neighboring countries.

In responding its relative weakness in competitiveness, the Vietnam tourism industry has increasingly over-exploited natural and human tourism resources – cutting development costs in areas such as environmental management and providing poor worker conditions (Thanh, 2007). The deprivation of environmental resources has appeared widely in many tourist destinations such as Cat Ba, Ha Long, Da Nang and Vung Tau.

Introduction to event

The 2015 Southeast Asian Games, officially known as the 28^th Southeast Asian Games or 28^th Sea Games is a multi-sport event hosted by the city-state of Singapore. Sea games is held once in two years since 1959 and the first time is held in Thailand, Bangkok. The games are under regulation of the Southeast Asian Games Federation with supervision by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the Olympic Council of Asia. The games are participated by 11 countries which are Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam, Myanmar, Cambodia, Timor-Leste, Brunei and Laos (28^th SEA Games, 2015).

Singapore is the fourth time has hosted Southeast Asian Games since 1993, after a 22-year long hiatus. The 28th Southeast Asian Games was held from 5^th June 2015 until 16^th June 2015 at the Singapore Sports Hub as main sporting location. The SEA Games was conceived as an expedient to avail forge vigorous regional cooperation, understanding and unity within the South East Asian community. It was established to be a bi-annual multi-sports event to take place between the years when the Olympic Games and the Asian Games were held. In addition to that, about 7000 athletes from 11 participating nations with 36 sports and 402 events will feature in the 28^th Southeast Asian Games Singapore 2015.

In 2011 during the 26th Southeast Asian Games, held in Indonesian cities Palembang and Jakarta, as the host of the 28th Southeast Asian Games of 2015, Singapore has been nominated to host the event in 2007 and 2013 before, but turned down both opportunities referring to costs connected with the construction of the new Singapore Sports Hub.

The 28^th SEA Games will show the people of the Southeast Asia that success ultimately comes to ordinary people with extraordinary dreams. It’s not about having a champion, but inspiring the champion that is inside each of us.

Stakeholder of the event

People and organisations with a legitimate interest in the outcomes of an event are known as stakeholders. The successful event manager must be able to identify the range of stakeholders in an event and manage their individual needs, which will sometimes overlap and conflict (Johnny et al, 2007). As with event impacts, the event will be judged by its success in balancing the competing needs, expectations and interests of a diverse range of stakeholders. When asked the question ‘what makes an event successful’, there are now numerous shareholders that are key components of modern major events that are looking at a whole range of different measures of success. Thus, the stakeholders that I have chosen for discussion of the event impacts are the government and the sponsorship.

The first stakeholders that I have chosen is the organizer of the 28^th Southeast Asian Games, which is the Singapore Sports Council (SSC) as it relates to stakeholders of government of Singapore. The Singapore Sports Council (SSC) is the national sports agency responsible for engendering access, opportunities and capabilities for individuals to live better through sports. Through Vision 2030, Singapore Sports Council seeks to employ sports as a national strategy to stimulate positive, deeply embedded values for Singaporeans and Singapore. Singapore Sports Council was founded in 1973, through the merger of the National Sports Promotion Board (NSPB) and the National Stadium Corporation (NSC). It engenders opportunities for people to excel in sports; opportunities for people to be engaged in sports as, coaches, officials, volunteers or fans and opportunities for people to do business in sports as sponsors and investors.

Singapore is a sovereign republic, with a legal system based on the English common law. The Constitution lays down the fundamental principles and basic framework for the three organs of state, namely, the Executive, the Legislative and the Judiciary. The Executive comprises the Cabinet, which is responsible for the general direction of the Government and accountable to Parliament. The Legislature comprises the Parliament and is the legislative authority responsible for enacting legislation. More information on the history of Parliament, Parliament House and activities of the House can be obtained from its website. The Judiciary’s function is to independently administer justice. The Judiciary is safeguarded by the Constitution.

The Prime Minister of Singapore is appointed by the President of Singapore under Article 25 of the Constitution. The President, acting on the advice of the Prime Minister, also appoints other Ministers from among the Members of Parliament. The Prime Minister is the effective head of the executive branch of government. He chairs the Cabinet, which is the central decision-making body of the executive government. It is an organ of state and central to Singapore’s system of government. Click for more information on the Cabinet appointments.

In order to attract sponsorships, event managers must offer tangible benefits to sponsors, and effective programs to deliver them. Large corporations such as Coca-Cola, 100 Plus and Telstra receive hundreds of sponsorship applications each week, and only consider those events that have a close fit with corporate objectives and a demonstrable ability to deliver benefits. For the event, sponsorship is therefore much more than a means of boosting revenues, but must also meet the needs and objectives of its sponsors (William et al, 2007).

Therefore, the second stakeholders that I have chosen is the main sponsor of 28^th Southeast Asian Games, which is the NTUC FairPrice and NTUC FairPrice Foundation. NTUC Fairprice Co-operative Ltd was founded by the labour movement in 1973, with a social mission to moderate the cost of living in Singapore. From one supermarket, it has grown to become Singapore’s largest retailer serving about 430,000 shoppers daily, with a network of over 120 outlets, comprising FairPrice supermarkets, FairPrice Finest and FairPriceXtra. Its convenience stores, FairPrice Xpress and Cheers, has a network spanning over 160 convenience stores island wide and serves over 100,000 customers daily. NTUC FairPrice also owns a Fresh Food Distribution Centre and a centralised warehousing and distribution company.

Today, with its multiple retail formats serving the varied needs and interests of people from all walks of life, NTUC FairPrice has kept pace with the changing needs of its customers while remaining committed to its social mission and its aspiration to be Singapore’s leading world-class retailer with a heart.

Guided by the philosophy to do well in order to do good for the community, NTUC FairPrice set up the FairPrice Foundation in 2008 to focus its giving efforts to provide a better life for the community. FairPrice Foundation focuses its giving on three strategic thrusts – the poor and needy, nation building and community bonding, and advancing workers’ welfare. FairPrice has since donated $76 million to the Foundation to further these three areas of focus.

Political benefits of the event towards chosen stakeholder

Based on the details above, political benefits towards NTUC FairPrice and NTUC FairPrice Foundation is increase international prestige. In Singapore, NTUC FairPrice’s sponsorship of 28^th Sea Games gave it the benefits of getting its brand name quickly recognised in the Singapore market. It is important for event managers to identify exactly what NTUC FairPrice want from 28^th Sea Games and what the 28^th Sea Games can deliver for them. They may be seeking mechanisms to drive sales, or want to strengthen client relationships through 28^th Sea Games to increase their international prestige and to attract more new customer.

Besides, political benefits towards NTUC FairPrice and NTUC FairPrice Foundation and the government of Singapore is promoting social cohesion. The sponsorship will include SGD $2 million cash from FairPrice Foundation and SGD $3 million value in kind from NTUC FairPrice to the 28th Sea Games in support of the region’s most prestigious multisport event. This is the largest donation FairPrice and FairPrice Foundation have made to a sporting event to date. This is an ideal partnership for the organizer of 28^th SEA Games which are Singapore Sports Council (SSC) as NTUC FairPrice has a strong relationship with the community. As part of FairPrice Foundation’s aim to create a better life for the community, the Foundation supports major activities and social community projects that cater to Singaporeans at large, to foster closer relationships among the community.

Economic benefits of the event towards chosen stakeholder

A primary concern of an event entrepreneur or host organisation is whether an event is within budget and, hopefully, results in a surplus or profit. This is a simple matter of whether the income from sponsorship, merchandise and ticket sales exceeds the costs of conducting and marketing the event. However, from the perspectives of the host communities and governments, a wider range of economic impacts is often of equal or greater significance. Therefore, economic benefits towards government are business opportunities and employment creation.

Events can provide their host communities with a strong platform for showcasing their expertise, hosting potential investors and promoting new business opportunities. During the 28^th SEA Games, the government of Singapore spent

Environmental benefits of the event towards chosen stakeholder

A major event may require an environmental impact assessment before council permission is granted for it to proceed. Even if a formal study is not required, the event manager should carefully consider the likely impact of the event on the environment. This impact will be fairly contained if the event is to be held in a suitable purpose-built venue, for example, a stadium, sportsground, showground or entertainment centre, but may be much greater if the event is to be held in a public space not ordinarily reserved for events such as a park, town square or street. Crowd movement and control, noise levels, access and parking will often be important considerations. Therefore, environmental benefits towards government is increased environmental awareness and urban transformation and renewal.

Firstly, environmental benefits towards government is increased environmental awareness. Governments of Singapore in 28^th Sea Games, are increasingly using public education and legislation to promote the recycling of waste materials and reduce the amount of waste going to landfill. 28^th Sea Games are targeted as opportunities to demonstrate best practice models in waste management and to change public attitudes and habits. Incorporating a waste management plan into the overall event plan has become increasingly good policy. Audience of the 28^th Sea Games expectations and the health of the environment require that events demonstrate good waste management principles and provide models for recycling. The waste-wise event manager (government) will reap not only economic benefits, but also the approval of an increasing environmentally aware public.

Secondly, environmental benefits towards government is urban transformation and renewal. In the staging of large events in Singapore such as this 28^th Sea Games, the provision of infrastructure is often a costly budget component, but this expenditure usually results in an improved environment and facilities for Singapore, and provides a strong incentive for Singapore to act as host. The government of Singapore has been constructed the original stadium to a new sport complex, which is the Singapore Sports Hub and it will be Singapore’s premier land and sea sports, entertainment and lifestyle destination. The Singapore Sports Hub is a state-of-the-art, fully integrated sports, entertainment and lifestyle hub that will allow everyone in Singapore to watch, play and support sports and entertainment. Featuring a unique cluster development of integrated world-class sports facilities within the city, it will not only spur the development of the sports industry, excellence and participation, but also take sports to the next level in Singapore.

Other Related Information

Reference List

28^th SEA Games. Available from: < https://www.seagames2015.com >

NTUC FairPrice. Available from: < www.fairprice.com.sg >

Government Singapore. Available from: < www.fairprice.com.sg >

Johnny Allen, William O’Toole, Robert Harris, Ian McDonnell, 2007. Festival & Special Event Management, Irwin, Sydney.

Jonathan Wong, 2015. Singapore SEA Games Budget. Available from:

Event Introduction & Background

We would like to do a detailed report that based on our findings on event planning and event evaluation process of an event. The event we have chosen is Chingay Parade. The Chingay Parade was firstly introduced in Johor Bahru in 2006 and it is a street parade event also a part of the celebration of Chinese New Year. The parade stretches go as far as 15km throughout the city of Johor Bahru, about 145 groups usually lasts from mid-afternoon to after midnight with an organized row of lion dances, interesting performances including dancing, singing, decorated parade floats and so on.

First, we would like to explain why the event is called ‘chingay’. Chingay has two characters; Chin and Gay is the Min Nan dialect (including Teochew) for the Art of Decorating. The deities as Chingay Parade have rarely reffered to Johor Bahru residents as annual parade. This name is mostly used by the non-Chinese speaking public; probably due to the non-religious fancy parades in Penang and later in Singapore. Although the decorated floats and painted Chinese folk-characters are part and parcel of this annual parade, the main theme actually is the procession of the Five Deities from the five main dialect-groups of Johor Bahru. Thus for a Johor Bahru resident, especially the Chinese-educated, this annual parade is always pronounced ‘You-Shen’, which meaning the Parade of the Gods in Mandarin, rather than Chingay.

As the historical of Chingay Johor Bahru, the Chingay Parade has been held for more than 100 years. It is celebrated on the 21^st day in the first month of the Chinese Moon-related calendar and the event attracts thousands of people every year also as part of the Moon-related New Year celebration and as a predictor of peace and richness for the coming year for the town. Besides, Chingay started as a birthday celebration of Chinese gods, whose statues were taken out of temples and paraded around the city. In the belief that they will then provide plenty blessings to the people. Johor’s Chingay has heavy religious importance, where all parades begin at the Old Chinese Temple in Jalan Trus (Johor Bahru). Chingay procession was held in celebration with the birthdays of the Chinese deities or the procession of the Goddess of Mercy (Guanyin). It was held to worship and enjoy with the deity.

Today, the JB Old Temple has five main deities for the five main dialect-groups: ‘Yuan Tian Shang Di’ or ‘Tua Lau Ya’ for the Teochews, ‘Hong Xian Da Di’ for the Hokkiens, ‘Gan Tian Da Di’ for the Hakkas, ‘Hua Guang Da Di’ for the Cantonese and ‘Zhao Da Yuan Shuai’ for the Hainanese.

On the 21^st day at about 7 in the evening is the grand parade, all the devotees and those with designated tee-shirts of the respective associations will then enter the Deities’ Depot to lift their respective deities for the night parade. This will be accompanied by troupes of opera characters, musical bands, lion-dancers, dragon dancers, decorated floats, stilt-walkers, big-headed dolls, giant flags and many other groups to entertain the town-folks who by then will line along the entire route eagerly awaiting the deities to pass.

The order of the procession is always predetermined. The first deity to lead the parade will be Zhao Da Yuan Shuai of the Hainanese clan, followed by Hua Guang Da Di of the Cantonese clan, then Gan Tian Da Di of the Hakka clan, Hong Xian Da Di of the Hokkien clan nd the last to round up the back is the main deity Yuan Tian Shang Di of the Teochew clan.

Event Planning (Definition)

In general, event planning is the process of managing a project such as a meeting, convention, birthday party, exhibition, conference and so on. Event planning includes money-planning, beginning and building on timelines, selecting and reserving the event sites, buying permits, planning food, coordinating transportation, developing a theme, arranging for activities, selecting speakers and keynotes, arranging for equipment and facilities, managing risk, and developing backup plans.

As event planner, event planning means consists of coordinating every detail of meetings and conventions, from the speakers and meeting location to arranging for printed materials and visual equipment. Besides, Event planning begins with figuring out the goal that the sponsoring organization wants to accomplish. Planners choose speakers, entertainment, and content, and arrange the program to present the organization’s information in the most effective way.

In addition to that, event planning is the energizing art of planning people and activities in order to create a show that creates memories of a lifetime. Designing and producing an event, whether it’s a meeting, related to big business event, fund-raiser, tradeshow or any other event, is in many ways almost the same as directing a live stage performance.

Event Planning (Important)

Event planning can help event planner to know what is the contribution should be and how to achieve event purpose. It is an important point to make sure that the event will be successful. It also can help planner to identify their event goals clearly and make planner decide clearly and concretely what the event need to do and can affect the social that organization wants.

Event planning also can help planner make sure that understand their goal and what they need to do to reach event goal by involving target consumer in the event planning process. It can make planners all work in a goal-oriented way more than in a loose way where planner just respond to issues and cries with not clear event goals as well.

Besides, event planning can helps planner to accountable for what they do. It is a consequential point, event planning can help planner or organization decide what is the best to use resources including hired people, equipment, time and other, so that will help planner and organization most significant contribution to achieving their purpose.

Last but not least, event planning important in lays the basis for event organization to asses and evaluate their achievements effectively.

Event Evaluation (Definition)

In general, event evaluation is analysis of the efficiency and efficacy of such events using a range of empirical methods. Event evaluation measures investigate impact at all levels. In apart from that, event evaluation is the process of critically observing, measuring and monitoring the implementation of an event in order to evaluate its results (Bowdin, 2008).

Event Evaluation (Important)

Event evaluation, as well as event planning cycle, it can help event organization and event planner to identify how they can improve and correct what they are achieving, event organization and planners also can take action to build on successes event and repeating failures in next time event.

Besides, effective event evaluation process enables event organization and event planner to use what they learned from their experience to improve what they are achieving in the event.

In addition to that, event evaluation is necessary to make event planner and team-mate more efficiency and effectively before the next time you organize an event. It is all about finding the mistakes and learning from them.

In apart from that, evaluating help event planner gets feedback from attendees and participants, discovering the best and worst bits of an event to know if the event achieved its original aims, or how it could be improved for the next event.

Moreover, evaluating shows volunteers and staff the value of their work and the impact of the event on the community. Some funders may require evaluations to be conducted, to show value for money as well.

Event Planning Process

Objective, visitor, place

Chingay is a cultural Chinese New Year festival, so that the visitor of the event will be Chinese. Location of the Chingay Event held in Johor. Through history, after World War II, this activity spread to the south of Peninsular Malaysia unconsciously, that is Johor Bahru. Johor Bahru Chingay is commonly known as “Chinese New Year celebration part 2”. There are a folk saying on Johor Bahru people that “Chinese New Year never come to end if no celebrate Johor Bahru Chingay”. In addition, since the Chinese living in Johor majority. This annual event is inextricably linked to the Old Temple at Jalan Trus.to organizes Johor Bahru Chingay Celebration with five Chinese dialect groups also called as Parade of Deities. Based on the size of the number, this event plan in outdoor so that can accommodate more participants.

Time, date, content

The Chingay is conducted in the first lunar month from 18th to 22nd (5days). And which consecutive 3 days from 19th to 21st are running with the main activities. In the morning, when the gong decorated with sacred flag bearer of the team will be deemed to walk and jingle of the gong in the entire parade route, this represents to “wash the way” before the festivities begin. On the first day on 17 February 2014, here is a light up ceremony at Xing Gong. It is a provisional places that deities choose. It can provide more spacious place to believers to pray. For the second and the third day, there is a street cleansing and mounting of deities on holy sedans followed by a small drum music parade and deities leaving the Old Temple carried on holy sedans. The location is from Johor Old Temple to palace. Thereby completing the centuries Chingay for three consecutive days of Overture. On the fourth day, activity held in the evening at 7pm. It is a busy streets walk of Johor Bahru from Xing Gong and walk around the Xing Gong. The distance of the line is about 8 kilometer. The town-folks are accompanied by decorated floats, lion-dancers, troupes of opera characters and so on. Lastly, 22nd February is the day of deities return to their Divine abodes, after this Johor Bahru resident will feel that they had finished their New Year.

Promotion+ Sponsorship

All the source of communication have been use. The organizer, Tiong Hua associations started to promote Chingay. As Chingay is an on-going parade, it has its own website. Besides this they also create a Facebook page welcoming for people to join. In the page, they listed out all details and the history of Chingay. For those who have questions, they also willing to give answers and the information will be update on time. In the other hand, the organizer promote the event through newspaper. Meanwhile, there will be banners and posters at anywhere in Johor. In addition, There also have media conference helped them publicise. For people who may not be able to see any information on others way, TV stations are another alternative for people to get Chingay information. Chingay is a recurrent activities, so not too much publicity, people will get to know about it. Based on the relationship between people, word of mouth also became a tool of mass media. In this event, people who participating were dressed in several different styles and different signs of T-shirt which are provided by the supplier that are Carlsberg, Tiger and Country Garden Danga Bay. Thus, the vendors can use this event to advertise their products.

Accessibility

Due to the wide range of activities involved, the number of participants more, even at night parade, it is easily lead to the accidents. In order to avoid the occurrence of such outside bruised and protect the safety of participants, the organizer had invite the medical staff to assist. The organizer also prepared a resting place for the participants.

Event Evaluation

Chingay parade event is a successful event in Johor Bahru, Malaysia due to it has a lot of foreign and Chinese people will join in this festival event every year. In this festival event, it affect a lot of benefits impacts as well as the cost.

In benefits, social and cultural impacts in this event including broaden people’s horizons because it has the festive atmosphere with stilt walkers, lion and dragon dances, acrobats, and dozens of decorated floats taking to the streets amidst the clashing of cymbals and beating of gongs and drums in this event. In this current issue, planner also try advantage a lot of new technology element inside this event so it will attract teenager joining this event.

Another benefits in social and cultural impacts are revitalising traditions. Due to this event is a traditional festival event, it can promote our traditional culture inheritance to next generation as well.

In addition to that, this event can increase Malaysian pride as well because have a lot of foreign know this event and it can let foreign know about our traditional culture.

The positive political impacts in this festival event are this event can let our social cohesion. This event purpose is unity ‘Teochew’, ‘Hokkien’, ‘Cantonese’, ‘Hakka’ and ‘Hainan’ all of these Chinese people during 19th century. In this current, also can let other race people know about Chinese religion so it will increase Malaysian cohesion in the country, because everyone will respect different race religion.

This event also will attract foreign tourists come to join in. It can increases tourists visit or travel in Malaysia so that we can earn and increase a lot of foreign money.

On the contrary, this festival event also bring negative impacts in environmental which make a lot of environmental damage and pollution in Johor Bahru, Malaysia. Due to the reason which people are going for a 15km around Johor Bahru, the participants will throw rubbish at the street and make noise. Besides, it will disturb residents around the city until midnight and this event increase traffic jam as well.

In the political negative impacts, event organizer cannot calculate their budget in this event. Their budget come from donation and find a lot of sponsorship. If the year has financial crisis, they will get the donation less than last year and let the event lead to failure because they need a lot of money to be the cash float.

Last but not least, it has a political negative impacts which are lack of accountability. Event organizer cannot predict the accountable of the amount of people who will join in the event and will make event organizer easily loss control of the event.

Recommendation

Evaluations often make recommendations about how a program can be improved, how the risk of program failure can be reduced or whether a program should continue. Based on the environmental negative impacts as environmental damage and noise disturbance, we can increase participant awareness about the knowledge of 3Rs which including reduce, reuse and recycle and everyone has responsibility to make sure the environment is clean. As traffic jam problem, we can encourage participant to achieve a sharing car plan with others or taking the public bus instead of taking private car. Chingay Johor Bahru can solve the noise disturbance problem by considering to plan the event not ended until mid-night for next year.

Furthermore, due to the political negative impacts which are lack of accountability, the event organizer can do a survey form on social media first, understanding total how many people will participate the event before organizing and planning the event.

Last but not least, the event organizer should planning the financial report first before finding a sponsorship to record how much they need to spent to control their budget.

REFERENCE LIST

What is event planning? Available from:

Event planning. Available from:

Johor Bahru Chingay. Available from:

Johor Bahru Chingay. Available from:

Introduction:

The event selected in order to complete this piece of work is the Rio Carnival. This is one of the famous festivals and it is held before Lent and it is known as one of the biggest festival where the participant public is more than two million in numbers each day. The festival is one of the oldest one as well. Before going in to further detail of the event and covering the topic as of different required angles the researcher will give a brief account about event management and the advances which has taken place with the passage of time and introduction of latest technologies. (Getz, 2007)

Life is full events that are not only interesting but full of attractions and adventure for the public. There has been a lot said and discussed and mostly one might find destinations under tremendous pressure as they are not sure how to deal by means of these events and save them as of becoming a touristic product. In the past, major events have been victim of different unwanted actions which has not only spoiled the image of the destination but in addition the fame of the event has been affected to a great extent. In the present world where technology through media has covered all the entertainment aspects for public and public can enjoy the event as of the confinement of their home just by sitting in front of their television sets, still the real joy is for live entertainment as public want to participate and be part of the colourful environment which cannot be captured or experienced through television no matter how good they are captured.

A superior repeatable Event Management method offers an organization with the aptitude to sense Events, recognize them, and then choose on a suitable control commotion or action to avoid an occurrence and/or service disruption. Suitable activities or behaviours can comprise of an action to release an event or to trace an event. Well-organized service procedures base on the well-timed handling of the several activities essential to avoid confrontations and service outages. (Reisinger, 2009)

As Event Management offers the capability to sense incidents before time, an association can configure technology to sustain an Event Management procedure to activate an event after it has been mechanically noticed and be automatically allocated to the suitable resolver faction for action before any definite service disruption or outage happens. Employing technology to sustain an Event Management procedure makes it probable for a few activities to be observed by exemption which can assist eradicate the requirement for costly and supply concentrated “real time monitoring”, whereas at the similar time, dropping unavailability or down time. Inside Event Management there are some altered kinds of events to handle which include:

Normal Operation Events:

These kinds of events can comprise an automatic announcement that a planned workload job has ended as usual or a consumer has logged into an appliance that they had the right point of admission to, or an email has attained an anticipated receiver. Standard process events are significant to observe since they might stand for a breach of policy or non observance to a development. (Richards et al., 2010)

Exception Events:

These kinds of events might comprise user endeavours to access an application with an wrong password too many times or, a device’s CPU is above an acceptable utilization rate or a PC scan reveals the installation of unlawful software. (Reisinger, 2009)

Unusual Events:

These kinds of events typically represent something unexpected and require immediate notice such as server memory utilization within 5% of the highest expected performance level, or the conclusion time of a transaction 10% longer than normal. The key point with any of these event kinds is that instant action should occur in order to either raise an incident record or a “dismiss and log” of the event for further monitoring and trending.

The Benefits of Event Management:

By officially applying these key activities of an Event Management course, organizations are able to augment effective efficiencies by becoming more practical at managing operations that knowledge faults and service outages. In today’s multifaceted IT environments, the degree of data being produced on a daily basis can be irresistible plus uncontrollable devoid of controlled and repeatable processes and the technology to support those processes. Millions of trade’s deals that rely on IT prop up are conducted every day. Devoid of an accepting of critical business processes, managing events turns out to be an unproductive best guess endeavour. (Getz, 2007)

An outline of what the festival/event is:

The carnival held once a year in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil is the for the most part well-known party in the world, growing year-on-year and attracting hundreds of thousands of foreign as well as national tourists. In the week about festival 80% of the yearly consumption of beer is drunk plus 70% of the yearly tourist profits are composed, undoubtedly showing the significance of the event inexpensively? To Brazilians festival and dancing are as significant as football, which is really saying something!

The roots of festival:

The name “carnival” comes as of the Latin word carnelevare meaning abstinence as of the eating of meat and poultry. Carnival week is held to agree by means of the start of the Roman Catholic period of Lent, 40 days prior to Easter. Lent is conventionally a period of abstinence, prayer and self-evaluation for Christians and represents the 40 days that the Bible tells us Jesus spent in the desert resisting the temptations of Satan. As the dates for Easter vary each year so do those for the main carnival weekend. There are several parades and parties by plus following the main labelled events in the Sambodromo, some of which are free plus held in the street in various districts about the city or as practice weekends in the central site itself. (Dunne L et al., 2002)

Carnival as a festivity of music, dancing, misbehaviour as well as extremes plus dates back to the ancient Roman carnival of Saturnalia which was introduced in 217 BC to lift the confidence of battle-weary Romans next overcomes by the Carthaginians. It was classically a week of eating, drinking as well as the deride turnaround of the communal order, slaves being given several further liberties for instance Several Roman Emperors such as Augustus and Caligula tried to shorten the festivities to 3 days but were met by means of such chaos plus were forced to depart the occupants to their social gathering. (Getz, 2007)

Rio Carnival today:

Even though Rio Carnival may not be the lone party in Brazil, is still expensive well-known. As far as the participants are considered, biggest carnival in terms of member is held in Recife in the North where in 2006 1.5 million people took part. The Rio event has developed repeatedly since its occurring back in the 17th Century furthermore every year it grows in size and more area and samba schools turn out to be mixed up in the spectacle. Blocos (Blocks) are tiny or middle sized congregation of musicians and dancers drawn as of neighbourhoods who parade with a challenging topic, motto and point. They could be clothed in matching T shirts or in extra excessive outfit and there are now over 100 Blocos, numerous of whom do not even go away as of their street or neighbourhood while displaying. Hundreds of local people congregate and escort them in their hard work. (Richards et al., 2010)

Over deeply financed samba schools are huge groups of performers which participate in parade competitions in a particularly built Sambodromo. These schools procession held on the 4 major nights of the carnival, along with the title parade person held on the Saturday night. The official opposition can be alienated into 10 categories and a winner picked as of each distribution after being reconsidered on each of the following; drumming band, Samba song, Harmony, Flow and spirit, subject of the year, Overall impression, Floats and props, Costumes, Vanguard group and Flag bearer. There are 4 judges in each group and these people sit in booths along the parade route in the Sambodromo. Great standing is awarded to the winners and the rivalry is taken very critically with massive amounts of attempts, exercise and money invested. (Reisinger, 2009)

Entrance tickets for the Sambodromo parades are awarded and as such are costly even in the low-priced bleacher seats which cost some hundred dollars. Places in the VIP boxes run to thousands of dollars as they offer the spectator much more ease and availability of facilities, open bar, 3 course dinner etc. for what is a lengthy of viewing. Tickets and some hotels frequently sell out month’s in advance so if you want to go ensure a longer way in advance.

The stakeholders:

Keeping in mind the nature of the event it turns out to be clear that the stakeholders are basically the tourists and local audiences that come as of everywhere to enjoy this event, its colour and the different parade and dances which are the very major part of this festival. (Bichou et al., 2007)

Social-cultural benefits and issues linked with festival:

The modern world is facing threats like terrorism and target killing and there are many parts of the world where the criminals wait for such mega events so that they can get a chance to cause damage on high scales. The damage can be anything like robbing, killing and even bomb blasts which are normally the key focus for terrorists in today’s world. The community may always feel itself at risk during such programs and events as the ratio of crime is higher and it’s difficult to trace and control due to the size of event.

Talking about benefits, festival like Rio brings business to the country and enables the foreigner to understand the culture of the native people. Not only does it attract people for long time but even in the four (Getz, 2007)

What tourists might perceive as an attempt to get closer to the authentic and to break through to the back region, hosts will often perceive as a violation, an infringement on private and personal space, and these differing perceptions shape the power relations flanked by hosts and tourists.

Just as objects are altered as they are placed in the front and false back regions, the hosts are alienated through their roles in the business: they become “anders,” someone other than what they once were. This view of how hosts and their culture are changed allows me to locate the central notion of authenticity in the critique of the tourism business in the works in my learning. The three authors portray tourism as making those who live and work in the business “anders.” Returning to the notion of front and back regions, then, I argue that the artists portray the genuine back region as a space that has been lost or is threatened by tourism, as it is gradually becomes “anders” and is turned into a false, staged back region. The learning depicts tourism and its impacts as a threat, implicitly noting a failure to protect the authenticity of the back region as of tourism.

Discussion on how the festival event can help to foster cultural understanding

There are many possible ways in the carnival may help in order to foster cultural understandings. The world has turns out to be small village and as a result people have turns out to be closer to each other with the help of Information technology. That is the main cause behind the fact that people want to know about each other’s culture values and beliefs as they find knowing about these cultural values very interesting. In order to get the cultural understandings events like The Rio Carnival plays a key role as not only the fact that its is very attractive but at the same time it’s one of the famous and big festival that automatically attracts the attention of people as of all over the world and they want to know about it, how it started and the other linked cultures with it. (Bichou et al., 2007)

People as of all over the world as mentioned earlier fly to Brazil to enjoy this festival. This gives them opportunity to know about the local cultures and the different interesting facts that may be associated with these cultures which may vary after every hundred miles depending on the locals of the country and different cultural beliefs which they may possess.

Recommendations for mitigating negative social and cultural impacts of the event festival

Contemporary world faces some serious threats. These threats can be terrorism, robberies, killings and other issues. Terrorists are always in search of such festivals and social gatherings where the number of participants irrespective of the fact that they are performer or audience. This simply for the reason that the more big the gathering is the bigger will be the level of destruction which may be caused by these terrorists.

Therefore, it turns out to be the responsibility of the event management team and the concerned authorities to make sure that all the available latest tools and other facilities like information technology and managements and security techniques are adopted in order to make sure that the event management is successful at the same time is safe as of any kind terrorist activity which may cause the loss of precious lives. (Getz, 2007)

Conclusions:

Considering the intricacies of IT organizations at present, there is a strong need of fine Event management practice and the requirement for technology enabled procedures is vital for best possible operational effectiveness. The purpose of an Event Management course is to perceive events of significant service factors and react instantly to direct those events. At present we want data gathered, concurrent, processed and then analyzed as much swiftly and correctly as possible. Effectiveness commence with prior preparation to get an idea that which services are essential and entail supervision along with usual reassess sessions to keep these rules clear, precise and applicable. (Reisinger, 2009)

Technology contributes a great deal in enhancing the Event Management process by computerizing the real process actions themselves (for example event recognition, event announcement and automatic incident formation), and through analyzing the results as of some other associated procedures (such as Configuration Management). Incorporation with other practices (particularly Incident Management, crisis Management, Accessibility Management, Configuration Management and Service rank Management) is crucially significant to guarantee that events are handled efficiently and that the maximum levels of accessibility and service are kept. (Getz, 2007)

The National Tourism Office for Portugal describes the country as one of the world’s oldest nations whose boundaries have remained unchanged since the thirteenth century. It encompasses the Azores and Madeira within its region and offers rapid access to other countries in Europe as well as the American continent and Africa. It has mild winters and ‘agreeable’ summers. It has a population of over 10 million, with the highest demographic in Lisbon. It boasts strong and historical and cultural ties with the rest of the world. (Sourced from: http://www.portugal.org/index.shtml, Date accessed, 12/01/09)

Located in South West Europe Portugal has been an economic and politically powerful country and played a key role in early maritime exploration during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

It is clear that tourist brochures key objectives are to sell a positive and appealing destination to travelers; what is not quite so apparent are the disguised messages that are frequently conveyed by the way in which certain pictures are produced and by way of cleverly composed coded text throughout.

Two official brochures issued by the Portuguese Tourism Office will be analysed for their content within this paper. This will mostly focus on visual images as well as some textual interpretation. One represents a traditional travel brochure depicting the country generically, while the other is their most up to date promotional campaign brochure which has only recently been launched.

In Eric Laws’ Embracing and Managing Change in Tourism he talks about using content analysis to make ‘replicable and valued inferences from data to their context’. His model seeks to decode messages according to categories including location, activities, transport and travel parties etc whilst breaking down the analysis in sections; the front page, photographs and text. (Laws, 1998) It is this approach that will be applied to this paper.

Assessing first the more traditional brochure for the country, immediately the front cover conveys a sense of isolation, with what appears to be a digitally enhanced image of a rock in the middle of the sea. Whether this is meant to represent Portugal is unclear and although a little uninspiring it will appeal to a certain type of audience that will want to discover more. This audience target becomes more apparent the further into the brochure you read. The first page into the literature provides a mixture of emotive, nationalistic and evocative images. A local Portuguese poet is quoted as a means of engaging the reader immediately with the prospect of a country which is inspired by the arts, as well as characterising it as a country not to be confused as a seaside resort, but rather for its lesser known rugged mountains and lakes which are illustrated romantically on the front cover. The accompanying text continues to relay all of the diverse things that Portugal has in terms of appealing to a broad audience. These include nightclubs, hiking or deserted coves. However whilst it may seem to want to appeal to all people it is at the same time obviously trying to attract the type of middle class, sensitive and emotional visitor who will be inspired by beauty and poetry. The second page continues with this theme but elaborates on the architecture, museums and heritage to be discovered. Now the reader begins to imagine Portugal as more of an ‘old world’ country, which of course is what it is and it is clear that the brochure wants to emphasise this age old association with Portugal, not so much the seaside resort, but more of a cultural haven. Once again this romantic element continues across the following pages where the quaint old images are elaborated further with the introduction of the idea of romance. It’s as if the brochure has succeeded in coming across as a charming, welcoming country which is most suitable as a destination for lovers and couples to embrace. The reader is told that for the Portuguese ‘romance is as important as the air they breath’ It even goes so far as to say ‘one-night stands are out’ which automatically assumes that the young, single man or woman perhaps coming to the country in a group of similar young and single people would not feel comfortable or at ease. This is not the market that they want to encourage. It is a clever message and not so much cryptic, more overt in its presence. Already there have been four images all of which contain no people in them. This is particularly interesting as it suggests the sender of the message is trying to convey Portugal as a form of tourism which suits escapism.

Pictures of food and restaurants feature across the next two pages with a list of the ten things you should not leave Portugal before tasting. Portugal thrives on its high-level services like drinking, eating and shopping and it seems uncharacteristic then that for a thirty six page brochure only around three or four pages have any images of food, bars or restaurants.

Already this assumes in many ways that the country has defined its tourist and is utilising different methods of trying to attract them. In Finn et al’s Tourism and Leisure Research Methods: Data Collection, Analysis, and Interpretation the authors write about a research study which took place over three years on a remote Scottish Island with the intention of understanding better the relationship between islanders and tourists. Life on the island changed significantly over the summer months when visitors arrived and the study was able to determine that all visitors could be clearly categorized. The categories included day-trippers, summer residents, tourists, returning island-born visitors etc. (Finn et al, 2000) The tourists were defined, known and responded to accordingly.

Each country has an understanding of who their visitors are and will attempt to appeal to them as categories, such as those listed above. In order to do that they apply a number of techniques that will be designed to capture the imagination of any given category. This particular brochure omits any indication of hedonism, instead it depicts couples walking or lone back-packers. There are no crowd scenes, no shots of happy groups of participatory people. The focus remains on large rural landscapes, with urban representations limited to the city architecture, rather than on nightlife or entertainment. The word romance appears seven times in the first four pages, which immediately indicates that the oweness is on this type of visitor; a couple or perhaps two friends looking for meaningful encounters rather than drink-fuelled, party antics. This isn’t isolated to one section of the brochure either, it is prevalent throughout even in the pages selling Lisbon, Portugal’s adventurous capital city. In fact the word Lisbon only features once in some contact details at the end of the literature. Portugal’s capital is referred throughout by its old traditional Portuguese name, Lisboa. This in itself suggests that the tourist office is appealing to more sophisticated and knowledgeable travelers who will know that Lisboa is Lisbon. Some readers may understandably pick up a brochure of Portugal looking for Lisbon, but it is clearly this type of prospective visitor that the country is not necessarily interested in appealing to here. Page 19 goes into tremendous detail about the historical background of the region. For many standard holiday makers looking for a cheap and cheerful get away this will automatically leave them cold and disinterested. The text reads like a detailed guide book in the style of Lonely Planet or Time Out.

The Mosteiro dos Jeronimos in the district of Belem is a hymn in stone to Portugal’s maritime heritage, while the Torre de Belem is a potent symbol of Portugal’s great age of expansion. Even contemporary architecture takes on a maritime theme

– the amazing new Vasco da Gama bridge is in the shape of a giant sail.

After the devastating earthquake of 1755, Baixa Pombalina (the centre of Lisboa) was rebuilt in a classical style, but many of the winding mediaeval bairros remain, crammed with fascinating shops, restaurants and cafes. At night they come into their own, offering everything from African to Latin American music – and of course the bluesy melancholy of fado.

This is not the language traditionally associated with grabbing the attention of hard marketing, fast promoting tourist attractions and once again only seeks to reiterate the type of audience they are trying to capture.

The second brochure for analysis is very different in its approach. It has been designed in a deliberately stylized way to grab the attention of the potential tourist. The reader is informed immediately that this has been created specifically for Portugal by the world renowned photographer Nick Knight. A photographer who is British, which immediately eradicates any thoughts of patriotism or national pride which comes across so clearly in the opening pages of the other brochure. And on the cover the reader is presented with a juxtaposing photograph of the Portuguese football manager Jose Mourinho resting above the caption ‘My country has 220 days of sunshine every year’. Jose Mourinho is the face of Portugal, literally. Not only that but the accompanying statement makes it personalized somehow, as if Mourinho was talking to the reader as a friend or confident. This is a very clever way of engaging readers. In addition it is almost as if the writers of the brochure have decided that they need to associate the country more with a well known image. It signifies pride whilst boasting that it is a country blessed with sun and celebrities. National celebrities as well as the ability to attract other celebrities such as Nick Knight. It is a very bold, confident style.

The most noticeable next technique to be analysed is the selected font that the brochure is written in. This looks like old computer style icons, which conjures up images of both the future in terms of technology and of nostalgia for old fashioned computer text. As a consequence the reader becomes drawn in by a familiar yet inspirational attitude towards the literature being presented. Is this the way in which Portugal is trying to be imagined? As an inspiring, forward-thinking country which is also reassuring some how.

As if carrying on with this theme the brochure then informs us that Portugal is essentially trying to re-define and re-brand itself, telling us on page 4, that its many and varied assets deserve to be ‘promoted and exploited….with a proper stage so that they can be seen, appreciated and valued as they are not enough at the moment’. This self-depreciating and yet overly confident message will appeal to readers on a number of levels.

The information which the reader is communicated on page 6 is particularly interesting. It seeks to plead with prospective tourists on the basis of beginning to disassociate itself away from its old Mediterranean identity. Despite none of Portugal’s coast being on the Mediterranean Sea, it has often promoted itself as a ‘Mediterranean area’. For the first time in this brochure it is realigning itself with the ‘Atlantic…and our home’. This signifies a complete change of image and identity for the country and one that it wants to relay to other potential visitors from around the world. After approximately seven extremely short paragraphs along this same theme and a biography of Nick Knight; what emerges is a series of robust images, first of rugged seascapes and rough coastal scenes which invoke feelings of drama, excitement and energy which is clearly what this ‘new’ Portugal is attempting to portray. Probably the most powerful messages are however the next set of portraits which illustrate well known Portuguese people including the architect Miguel Cancio Martins, the artist Joana Vasconcelos, the footballer Cristiano Ronaldo and of course Jose Mourinho. It is a brochure which is very stylised and reads more like a power point presentation than a piece of promotional tourist information. It is particularly visual and leaves behind any romantic, idealised, historical textual information so associated with the hard sell of ‘old world country’s’. Instead it is making a very brave and bold move into re-branding itself as a country to be viewed as a modern contender even going to the extreme of repositioning itself geographically within the Atlantic Ocean, rather than the Mediterranean. Perhaps this has been done in a move towards getting people to start associating it with an entirely new type of holiday which does not necessarily reflect the beaches, clubs and excitement connected to the Mediterranean, but more in line with the sophistication of the brochure discussed earlier. To be considered more like Mexico and Guyana rather than Cyprus and Greece; the more popular and media driven destinations which are more and more prone to be associated with package tours, groups of young people and stag and hen parties. The other rationale for its provocative move might relate to the Middle East; so firmly entrenched as it is in the Mediterranean, in particular Israel and Libya. Recent political unrest and continued problems in this area might have prompted Portugal to consider disassociating itself from its previous identity.

In Pritchard and Morgan’s study, Evaluating vacation destination brochure images: the case of local authorities in Wales, they identified the power and influence of images appearing in brochures into six groups all of which assist with establishing identity; scenery, activities, people, heritage, urban and rural and iconic destinations. (Pritchard and Morgan, 1995). This contemporary brochure proves no different in many ways. It still succeeds in Portugal establishing itself as a vacation destination in that it projects large bold images of Portugal’s natural scenery, not its heritage, castles or monuments, but the wildlife that exists around its coast, the people of course are also iconic representations and exemplify the country as a modern forward thinking and inspirational place to go. No activities are demonstrated but the photographs of well known people listed by occupation craftily suggests that it is possible to do anything in Portugal, whether that be a scientist, artists, architect or even an Olympic champion. Portugal has it all.

The juxtaposition of both brochures; traditional and contemporary have been interesting to analyse in relation to their differences as well as their very obvious similarities. From this angle it is determinable that messages may often be similar or indeed the same but that they can be delivered in very conflicting ways in the context of differing perspectives. Many of the messages relayed in both brochures advertising Portugal predominantly appeal to more broad minded, sophisticated audiences who appreciate and know a little more about life and the world around them. By doing so it sometimes actually serves to discourage anything other than that type of tourist, which may on some levels seem risky, whilst on others is understandable if the country has faced economic, public or political issues due to the nature of their tourism or media associated tourism.

References

Finn, M, Elliott-White, M, Walton, M (2000) Tourism and Leisure Research Methods: Data Collection, Analysis, and Interpretation: Pearson Education

Laws, E, Faulkner, W, Moscardo, G, Faulkner, B (1998) Embracing and Managing Change in Tourism: International Case Studies: Routledge

Pritchard, A and Morgan, N. (1995) Evaluating destination brochure images: the case of local authorities in Wales, Journal of Vacation Marketing, Vol 2, pp 23-38

Ringer, G.D (1998) Destinations: Cultural Landscapes of Tourism: Routledge

Official Portugal Tourism Office (Sourced from: http://www.portugal.org/index.shtml, Date accessed, 12/01/09)