Assistant professor, Corvinus University of Budapest katalin.asvanyi@gmail.com
The actuality of our study is that Budapest won the American poll of Porthole Cruise Magazine as Best River Cruise Port of the Editor-in-Chief Award 2014. The study aims to give a picture about cruise hotel tourism in Danube and to show Budapest, the capital of Hungary and a popular tourist destination, which is becoming a major, internationally recognized port city on the Danube. It is a very good possibility to have a better image. The European river routes are becoming increasingly popular for American tourists. It also shows the success that more companies organizing cruise hotel trips to Budapest were also listed on the annual Gold List of Condé Nast Traveller. An average of 110 cruise hotels comes to Budapest per year. 80% of the ships are occupied by American tourists who like to prolong their route a 3-4 day stay in Budapest, where they can visit the varied tourist attractions of the city and its surroundings. In the context of the study the cruise hotel stays in the Danube are presented and analysed, and we get a picture about Budapest as a preferred and increasingly popular tourist destination.
Introduction
The image of Budapest is influenced by a lot of marketing tools, local people and tourists. Cruise tourism is a special type of tourism which has a growing trend in the world and also in Budapest. That’s why our main research question was how the cruise tourism could influence the image of Budapest. We use 3 types of research methods: interviews document analysis and questionnaire, but in this article, we present only the last two ones. Our study we analysed the brochures of a cruise company to know what elements of tourist image the mention about Budapest. In the questionnaire survey we asked almost 200 people about their opinion, what they think about the image of Budapest. We assumed our results in a table to show that according to Mazanec (1994) tourist image elements, the functional ones are much stronger in Budapest than the psychological ones.
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Theoretical background
The image of tourism destinations in research work began in the 1970s. Hunt had one of the first definitions in 1971; its image is defined as people’s all impressions about other places than the place of residence. In recent decades, many researchers clarified the concept of tourism image. Crompton’s (1979) definition draws attention that the tourism image involves beliefs, ideas and facts. According to Parenteau (1995) among the elements of the image there are positive and negative impressions to. (Gallarza, Gil, Calderon 2002) Sulyok (2006) wrote that the tourism image is a constantly changing, complex, has complicated structure, and relative and changing patterns in space and time.
According to Gunn (1998), the tourism image appears in two levels, the organic and the indicated level. The first one means the non-tourism specific news, television reports, articles, and other information. The second level is the marketing messages mediated by destination management organizations. Fakeye and Crompton (1991) complemented these two levels with a further one, the personal experiences.
The elements of tourist image can be determined by Mazanec (1994) along functional and psychological axis. Mazanec (1994) analysed the image elements based on 25 researches. Along the axis, the elements appear from tangible towards the emotional elements. The basic functional elements are the wide variety of attractions, landscape, environment, natural environment, cultural attractions and entertainment, nightlife. Among the emotional image elements the quality of services, originality and hospitality play the most important role.
In tourism image the landscape, the natural environment, cultural attractions the hospitality, the local people’s attitude and the entertainment are the strongest elements, so most of the tourist experts examine these elements. More important, but less commonly accepted elements of image are the accommodations, hospitality, gastronomy, destination accessibility, climate, shopping facilities, as well as the peace of mind.
According to Echtner and Ritchie (1993) tourism image can be examined along two more axes: individual characteristics – holistic and average/common – unique. Most of the authors think that the unique image elements are the most important along all three axes. These could determine the destination’s strengths which could be used for distinguish the destination from the other ones.
Milman and Pizam (1995) distinguish the tourism image elements into three components: the product which is associated with quality of services and the price/value ratio, the attitude to travellers/guests as hospitality, and the environment (for example landscape, natural environment, weather).
142 Trends of cruise tourism
The river cruising industry is one of the fastest growing vacation markets. Its growth rate is almost double compared to the overall transportation sector. There are more drivers of the growth. The population of the main sending countries have high standards of living. There is an increasing competition in the market, which means especially price competition for us. In more countries for example Russia, Ukraine and Bulgaria the cruise companies try to get more and more guests by decreasing their prices (Dragin et al. 2010). New and growing needs appear which become more important. More people desire to try new method of travelling; they want to meet more destinations without any moving. So the cruise hotels are very comfortable for them which give all luxury and security thing they need.
During the economic crises the cruise tourism had also good utilization and even in the last five years the number of passengers has increased by 10 % per year.
(Hill 2013) In early 2014 more operator companies had already sold all tickets for the year 2015, so it is difficult to keep up with this growth. One of the biggest companies in the US, Viking River Cruises built six more cruise hotels and plans to raise additional ten.
The increased market demand leads to the formation of new round cruise trips every year. However, due to the increased competition not only the cruises but the destinations also have to keep up with the quality demand with their programs. Recognizing this demand cruises have to meet their guests’ needs not only on the cruise hotel but also with the destination program to special and different target groups. With new packages and thematic tours they can reach new segments of guests.
Cruise hotels offer a very good possibility to destinations where they stop to show their attractions and complex programs to the cruise guests. It is often carried out in such a way that the passengers disembark the cruise and have a one day sightseeing. (Jászberényi 2014) These destination specific programs make the cruise tourism more and more interesting, which could be a horse or folklore show; wine tasting, cooking trainee etc. The starting and the ending point of the cruise trip have the most possibilities to convince the guests with creative ideas to stay some more days and better know the destination.
The target group of cruise tourism is the 50-70 year old men and women with a lot of free time and high discretionary income. The main sending countries are USA, Australia, Japan and the countries of Northern and Western Europe. So there is a big challenge to reach young people and families.
143 Cruise tourism in Budapest
The capacity of cruises on the Danube is around 160-180 people. Every year 450-500 thousand passengers visit Budapest on cruises. The European sender countries stagnate, the overseas market increases 20% per year. 80% of the overseas passengers are American. 40% of guests from overseas extend their stay in Budapest by 2-3 nights. Their hotel reservation is concentrated on the 4-5 star hotels on the bank of the Danube, like Sofitel Budapest Chain Bridge, Budapest InterContinental, and Budapest Marriott Hotel. (Jászberényi 2014) Annual number of ports by cruise is 15-20. There are 200 river cruises on the Danube, belonging to 10-12 bigger companies. There are five big operators in the cruising market. One of these five is the Tauck World Discovery. Budapest is the starting or the ending point of the trips in most of the times.
Methodology
We chose the method of document analysis and questionnaire as two options to explore the image of Budapest. The advantage of the document analysis is that the documents are easily and quickly accessible via the Internet which makes this research method highly economical. In some cases, such materials are the exclusive sources of information. Another advantage of this method is that it does not affect the research results, but the materials concerned are not always comparable. The documents may reflect a unilateral view as they represent the approach of the company Tauck World Discovery about Budapest by brochures (Golnhofer 2001). However, these sources are sometimes difficult to access and/or deficient, and coding may also be a serious problem (Krippendorf 1980).
The questionnaire –base survey is the best method for the researchers who want to collect authentic data. It is perfect to measure the attitude or the orientations of a larger sample mass. But it has the low validity but high reliability. The findings can be generalized. (Babbie 2000)