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TOUR 2006: Experiential Product Design for Tourism, Events and Hospitality

1. Assignment Help

This page will assist you to find scholarly information and other resources to support your assessments.

Please refer to your course outline and course LearnOnline site for full assessment details.

2. Design thinking process

Design thinking is a process that seeks to solve complex problems by approaching it from the user's perspective.

Watch the video (2 min 18 sec) below for an explanation of design thinking.

3. Understand types of references

For your assignment some (but not all) of your references must be from 'academic sources'. The following video (2 min 22 sec) explains what this means:


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4. Plan your search

The first step of your assignment is to decide on a new experiential product (e.g. experience) for tourism, events, or hospitality. This product could be a new tourist attraction, an event (or aspect of an event), or in the context of hospitality, a unique venue or accommodation.

You can search the following sites to help you decide on your new experiential product.

There are some useful sites listed in the Organisations tab of the marketing guide.

You can also search across and within multiple national and international newspapers to find information. See the News Media Guide for more information.

In addition, before you start searching, you will need to understand some of these key concepts related to your assessment, such as experience economy or experiencescape.

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5. Searching for resources

The Library Collection is a useful starting point for locating academic references. It searches across the Library's collection of print and electronic books, DVDs, journals and theses, together with journal and newspaper articles from numerous databases. 

Sample library search: "tourism product" OR "experience economy"

  • use AND between terms to search for both
    e.g. promotion AND pricing
  • use OR between similar terms to search for either
    e.g. attendance OR visitors
  • use double quotes around phrases
    e.g. "experience economy"

Use the 'refine my results' to find academic sources by:

  • Limiting to articles from Peer Reviewed Journals
  • Limiting by Date e.g. 2019 to 2024
Remember! You will need to to identify additional concepts and add or adapt your search as you complete the product design and product implementation sections. For example you can adapt the search above to become: Sample library search: experience economy" AND (attendance OR visitors)

6. Finding company and industry research

Company and Industry Information guide

Your final report should be backed by academic and industry research.

Have a look at our online guide to finding Company and industry information. This guide will help you search the web and our databases to find company and industry information, financial information, annual reports and country information.

7. Exploring databases

WARC is useful to find articles, case studies, and research on industry and consumer trends.

Tip: Try a general search first, for example tourism. You can then filter your search with options such as geographic region and date range.

Statista is the leading statistics portal for market data, market research, and market studies. In this database, you can find statistics relating to companies, industries, and consumers, such as:

  • Brand and company reports
  • Dossiers, studies, and reports relating to tourism industry
  • Statistics relating to the tourism industry
  • Topic relating to the tourism industry
  • Free to publish charts in presentations, website, and marketing materials
  • Download diagrams such as Graphic (PNG), Excel (XLS), PowerPoint (PPT) or PDF

Search Statista

8. Oral presentations

The below resources may be useful in developing your oral presentation skills:

9. How to write a report

Now that you have done your research it is time to put all of your information together. Remember that there are specific formatting requirements listed on your LearnOnline course site.

Watch this short video (2 min 53 sec) for tips on how to write a report or access the overview document at the bottom of this box.

10. Finding and using images

Images can be a great way to visually enhance assignments and presentations. As part of your assignment you are strongly encouraged to use images and diagrams. Remember, these will also need to be referenced. The following sites can be a great starting point for finding open or creative commons images. 

The library also subscribes to a number of image databases. See the Images and Videos category in the library databases tab. 

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11. Explore these recommended resources

Articles and case studies

Book chapters

Videos

12. Referencing Support

Managing your references

What do you do with all those references you have found? Use a bibliographic management software to store, organise and cite your references.

There are many free systems available. The Library supports the bibliographic management tool EndNote. For more information see the EndNote guide.