My Course Takeaways

Coming from an English and Communications background, I knew I had my work cut out for me when I joined a tourism and hospitality management class. Besides the appeal of traveling to The Bahamas over winter break, I have always been interested in the hospitality and tourism fields. Even though I had only taken one tourism class before, I knew this would be the perfect opportunity to expand my knowledge. After 10 days of in-depth research, participant observations and analysis, I can say with certainty that I gained indispensable experience from this course.

While there are many takeaways I have from our Customer Experience Analysis course, the most important one I have is learning the benefits of participant observation. After mystery shopping a handful of restaurants, attractions and tours in The Bahamas, I now understand how beneficial participant observation is. When we presented our findings to the Ministry of Tourism, our conclusions and recommendations were highly credible since we represented their target clientele. Unlike the majority of the tourists that arrive by cruise ships, we actually stayed on the island and were able to dine at authentic Bahamian restaurants and tour the iconic attractions. Based on our 10-day experience, we were able to transform our journeys into recommendations that these restaurants, tours and attractions can later implement.  

Another takeaway I have from our course is learning the importance of a multi-method approach. When doing in-depth research based on customers’ experiences, grounding your research in various sources and methods is crucial. When presenting to the Ministry of Tourism, simply giving them our overall impression of our experience there would not be enough. While recording our experiences is certainly beneficial, gathering outside research from in-person interviews and online reviews makes our overall findings much more credible. When we made recommendations to the Ministry of Tourism, we were able to back-up our suggestions with at least five different sources of data, making our research highly dependable.

Furthermore, after hyper-critically analyzing the tourism in the Bahamas, I have been able to see the positive impact tourism has on the country. The majority of Bahamians are stakeholders in the tourism there, whether it be in the restaurants, hotels or the various retail shops. As soon as the cruise ships open their doors, the streets of downtown Nassau are flooded with tourists. Finally being able to see the role that tourism plays on the country was eye-opening, and puts in perspective how dependable the country is on this industry. Even though our 10 days in The Bahamas flew by, I am beyond grateful to have had the opportunity to study and research such a beautiful country.