The Long Way of Organizational Communication in Tourism: From Theory to Practice

Organizational communication has become a topic on which increasingly more specialists express their views. Very few succed, however, to move from theory to practice, so that their attempt to be beneficial to it. Moreover, as a proverb (anonymously) very well reveals, "... we communicate increasingly more, but we understand increasingly less" ... In this context, based on available statistics (which surprised and confused us in equal measure) I aimed to analyze the extent to which beneficiaries of tourism units’ services are satisfied with the correspondence between their offer and the reality on the ground. Methodological, I turned in a first step to crowdsourcing. This is an alternative to get, as a result of outsourcing, required services and/or ideas by seeking contributions from large groups of people and/or communities turning to online resources and not to traditional employees or suppliers. This is the context in which I launched through a website accessible to all willing to participate in our research, a questionnaire aiming to evaluate the quality of organizational communication from tourism facilities. In a second step, I proceeded to the interpretation of the received responses checking, econometrically, through analysis of variance (ANOVA), the research hypotheses. Basically, I investigated the existing biunivocal relationship between the tourism facilities and the beneficiaries of their services, in order to identify and improve some external organizational communication trends, potentially generating performance effects as a direct result of improving customer relationship management. At the end of the work I formulated two proposals designed to reveal how and in what way can be reduced the distance (still huge) that separates managerial theory from the practice of customer relationship in the tourism, hospitality and leisure industry. Classification-JEL: J4, L84, M3, M5, M21.