Scope and patterns of marketing agility in tourism enterprises during COVID-19 pandemic restrictions

Abstract

Marketing agility has gained more attention from scholars and managers due to the current and emerging conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic has changed the marketing landscape, resulting in a dramatic shift in consumer behavior in the worldwide lockdowns. Consumers sought an efficient response and reaction in real-time to their changing needs, concerns, and priorities. The shift in consumer behavior and demand forced service enterprises to develop dynamic marketing plans to adjust to the new normal that created unprecedented disruptions in their traditional business. As one of the most dynamic sectors of service marketing, tourism was challenged by the pandemic-related restrictions and contemporary competitive circumstances and faced the destructive, yet transformative impacts of the outbreak. The tourism enterprises all over world were compelled to implement innovations to adjust to the new customer preferences and needs for a sustainable change to develop dynamic marketing solutions. This chapter aims to review and analyze how the tourism enterprises gravitated to a new approach and implemented an agile marketing strategy focusing on the emerging customer priorities, based on analysis of the hotel websites. A functioning group of 4 and 5-star hotels located in Bodrum, Turkey, was selected and their website updates from the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic to the proliferation of the vaccines were examined considering the official data on inbound, domestic and outbound tourism. The findings provided an insight into the concept of agile in tourism marketing applied to a function characterized by the radically changing conditions that bring in new threats and opportunities.