CUSTOMER RESEARCH PLAN

USING VIRTUAL REALITY TRAVEL

[GROUP3]
I. INTRODUCTION
What is Virtual Tourism?
Traveling with virtual reality technology is the application of specialized software
to create an environment that simulates destinations to give a feeling of authenticity
for virtual tours on the Internet, through 360° photos or videos. Today, the
development of the Internet connection creates a flat world, people just need an
internet connection to access and learn almost all the historical and scenic sites,
famous scenic spots around the world. Customers today demand more than that, they
want to experience the real thing, anytime, anywhere. This is an important push to
create travel demand in all people, a golden opportunity to expand the tourism
market.
Virtual Reality (VR) is a term that describes a simulated environment
established by humans. Humans will actively design these environments through
applications using specialized software to create a real feeling. These simulated
environments are mostly images displayed on a computer screen, 3D glasses, or
other devices that support actual display, but sometimes to enhance the experience
of some simulations through the combination of other senses such as sound or touch.

II. OBJECTIVES OF THE RESEARCH PLAN

Tourism market research is one of the core contents of tourism marketing and a key
task of destinations and tourism businesses. Market research in the broad sense is
the process of analyzing and hypothesizing to find out the consumer's consumption
behaviors (behavior patterns); how to respond to competitors, customers; changes in
science and technology have an impact on the product structure of the destination
and of the enterprise; policies and macroeconomic management mechanisms at
home and abroad that affect tourism supply and demand. In this research plan, we
mainly study customers using virtual reality travel services. The purpose of this
study plan is to help us answer the following questions:
• First, who are our customers? (Including potential customers; target
customers and current customers)
• Second, what does the customer want? From there, it is possible to generalize
or draw a portrait of the customer in which the characteristics of tourism
service consumption are identified as the dominant background.
• Third, who can be classified as a large customer group of the enterprise?
• Fourth, how do customers react to VR Tourism? What are the causes of such
reactions?
• Fifth, how are customers' needs changing? What are the new needs of
existing customers?
This information is very important for businesses in general and especially important
for tourism businesses. This comes from the fact that customers may be loyal to the
brand, but loyalty to the destination for two consecutive vacations is a finite number.

III. CONTENTS
1. Research potential market
a) Evaluation of market potential:
It is necessary to collect information from customers regarding their attitudes
towards the attractiveness of VR Tourism and the image of the company.
Information about the appeal of VR Tourism is extremely important. Potential
customers often find it hard to evaluate and compare different travel service
providers. Their decision to make comparisons often focuses primarily on the
assessment combined with the travel program based on their expectations.
Therefore, it is necessary to take advantage of the tendency to evaluate the
attractiveness of customers to take advantage of the image of service providers
for businesses.
 For example, Virtual Tourism allows users to experience realistic, lifelike
images of a digitized destination in a 3D environment without having to
move, through the help of technology, especially Virtual Reality with
supporting tools such as smartphones, computers, virtual reality glasses,
headsets, effect chairs, etc. This means, just sitting in one place, you can still
feel the immense green color of Moc Chau tea hills, participate in an
exciting journey to explore Son Doong cave, or visit famous monuments and
landscapes in the world.
b) Research the buying behavior of customers
The buying behavior of customers is affected by many different factors and
varies among customer groups.
• Factors affecting customers' buying behavior:
▪ Technological factors affect tourism demand: this is an indispensable
tool in attracting the attention of tourists in today's life. It helps to move
quickly, improving the speed of communication of VR Tourism events
to customers in need and saving time searching for information.
▪ Random factors: factors such as weather, special events, free time, or
unexpected changes in travel trends, etc are believed to have a positive
impact on tourism demand.
For example, if the climate becomes too hot or too cold, people will
also need to go to cooler, more pleasant places.
▪ Fee: Cost hurts tourism demand because it is one of the causes of
reducing people's desire to travel. Suppose when purchasing costs
increase, the demand will decrease and vice versa.
▪ Tourist destination: Distinctive characteristics, the popularity of a place
is believed to promote the formation of tourist demand. This is
explained because people always have the spirit of learning and
learning new things through travel. For example, the attractiveness of
culture and nature, geographical proximity, and security are factors that
have a strong impact on today's tourism demand.
▪ Socio-cultural factors: This is considered an influential factor
throughout the adult process of a person. Thereby, culture-tourism
influences tourism demand.
• Buying behavior and needs among customer groups:
▪ By age:
o Most of the seniors when traveling are afraid to go far because
of their unstable health and have to move a lot, so it is
 reasonable to use VR tours, but they find it difficult to know
how to use VR products. They often want to be consulted
carefully about the destination to suit their health, interests, and
financial ability, so they like to go to peaceful places, slow pace
of life, and open spaces such as old towns, countryside, sea, and
islands, or spiritual tourism such as temples and shrines.

o Middle-aged tourists are usually not too constrained to travel

during Tet holidays or go on their children's summer vacations.
They can travel whenever they want, depending on their
financial ability.
As a result, they are enthralled with the idea of traveling and
seeing cultures that they have not had the opportunity to contact
during their childhood and early adulthood. Due to its
psychological comfort, the criteria for hotel services and VR
excursions are not too tight.
o Teen and adult tourists: the need to find joy, relieve stress,
satisfy passions and interests, want to explore, experience as
well as to improve themselves.

▪ By gender:
o Male guests: Generous, open, practical, quality, willing to
spend, easily persuaded by beauty.

o Female guests: Sensitive, delicate, delicate, attention to details,

evaluate the senses, focus on appearance.

▪ According to personal income level:

o At the middle-high income level, they have a greater need to
travel to relieve stress after working time.
o At a moderate-income level, their travel intensity is also average,
about twice a year on holidays (because this group is mainly
employees).
o At a low-income level, they do not have a great need for travel,
about once every 2-3 years, and often choose economical, cheap,
or on-site travel to save costs.
• In addition, it is necessary to research and learn about customers' motivation
and consumption habits, often focusing on the following factors:
▪ First, information behavior: When making a decision, what sources of
information are used?
▪ Second, the purpose of travel: What is the aim of the trip, and how
many of them can be accomplished?
▪ Third, reservations: How do customers make reservations for services?
(Directly to businesses, through agents, representative offices, or
through the Internet).
▪ Fourth, seasonality: How are the information search, booking, and
implementation times of the customer's travel programs distributed
according to the times of the year?

c) Research of travel readiness

The focus of this section is on research on how potential customers' leisure time
is spent on travel. This can be obtained from relevant information such as:
▪ First, information seeking: When will customers know about their next trip?
▪ Second, booking: When is the customer trip booking made?
▪ Third, willingness to pay: What is the financial level that customers are
willing to pay for the trip?
▪ Fourth, the time to implement the program: When will the customer perform
the tour program or officially use the booked services?
d) Quality research:
• In essence, the study evaluates the good of services provided in advance for
tourists.
• It is necessary to assess the quality of the potential client consultation. For
example, the speed, completeness, and accuracy of the information requested
by the customer, the convenience of the registration process for travel services.
Often referred to as the Website and brochures and other promotional materials
and even a brochure about a specific travel program ordered by a guest.
• In addition, it is necessary to study the market limits to understand the general
market order of the participating suppliers. That is tied to market share
predictions that each supplier hopes to be able to materialize.
2. Market research done
The focus here is on the study of the service implementation process. It includes
research contents from the desire, extent, and scope of activities to meet and be
carried out in connection with the following contents: visitor participation behavior
and personal information exchange activities; customer service behavior.
a) Visitor engagement behavior and personal information exchanges
• Tourists at any time repeat dialogue activities or exchange personal
information in the process of performing tourism services.
• It is necessary to study the relationships and exchange of information
between customers and service personnel from businesses to VR Tourism
suppliers for enterprises such as market staff, executives, guides, etc. These
studies can reveal the characteristics of customers in terms of needs and how
they want to get service or from the service personnel involved. Therefore, it
is a vital basis to lead to customer satisfaction or dissatisfaction.

b) Customer behavior as a tourist

• In essence, the study of tourists' behavior during their travel program
implementation.
• A study of the costs incurred by visitors during program execution should be
conducted.
• A study of how much time visitors spend on itineraries and journeys (use of
trip time from departure to completion).
c) Satisfaction of clients
• When it comes to measuring tourist satisfaction, it's all about whether or not
the tourism services provided meet or exceed the visitors' expectations.
Observations or direct interviews with consumers at the end of a service, or
final feedback at the end of a travel program, should be used to gather
information on customer satisfaction. However, actual customer reviews can
be affected by factors that can lead to false information such as friendliness
and tact leading to customers viewing service flaws as is the past, weather
change, etc.
• In addition, it is necessary to study the dissatisfaction of the host population,
focusing on aspects of social, environmental, and economic impacts. This is
corporate social responsibility and thus directly affects the image of the
business.
3. Market research results

Researching customer satisfaction through primary research methods (collecting

and processing information directly from research subjects who are customers):
- Feedback from customers
- Customer suggestions and complaints
- Customers register news services or information about their needs for the next
time.
- Level of visitor satisfaction
- Quality control activities
4. Research on customer attraction of competitors such as ADT Creative and VR 360
- ADT Creative participated in many projects, created many applications of
virtual reality and augmented reality to serve the community, contributing to
attracting tourists; In particular, there are about 20 cultural and tourism
applications for tourism purposes. Their customers are mainly corporations
and businesses. After nearly 7 years of operation, ADT has implemented
more than 50 projects with more than 40 partners, they also have the
opportunity to work with "big guys" such as Vingroup, Viettel, Unilever,
Vpbank.... ADT creative also received many positive reviews from users.
- VR 360 has a website about itself to promote services/products
(vr360.com.vn) and has a Facebook page with nearly 3000 followers to
introduce and transmit images of their projects, works, and services. (VR360
- Virtual Reality, 3D, 360, Media & Website Design). After 2 years of
operation since 2019, it is quite impressive that they have completed an
impressive number of projects with a variety of partners. Their customers
are mainly corporations and businesses. They are the main partners of many
real estate projects, hotels, and resorts. Besides, they also cooperate with
Coopmart to launch the first virtual reality supermarket in Vietnam. Our
school also has a cooperation project with them, VR360 National Economics
University, Hanoi.

IV. METHODS
Methods of investigation and survey (using a brief and straight-to-the-point survey
questionnaire to get opinions from survey participants):
1. Face-to-face interviews: Usually conducted at high-traffic locations such as
public places, parks, or shopping centers to advertise and market VR Tourism to
users, and at the same time collect direct feedback response.
2. Direct survey: use a pre-designed market survey questionnaire, print it out, and
give it to everyone to fill out.
3. Survey via Email: send the questionnaire via Email to the set of customers.
4. Telephone survey: collect user information in advance and call for opinions, but
the customer survey questionnaire is usually very brief, focusing on product
evaluation on a scale.
5. Online survey: create a survey questionnaire on the internet and share it in
forums and groups to consult people.

V. PROCESS

1. 1. Design and prepare market research questionnaires.

- Object
- Location
- Number of people asking
- Number and types of questions (closed questions, open questions)
- The content of the questions in the questionnaire related to:
o Personal information
o Opinion/preference about travel
o Opinion/preference about VR Tourism
o Classification of users (users, restaurant/hotel owners, travel
agencies)
2. Conduct information gathering.
Approach the subjects that need to collect information to bring up the market
survey, interview to get opinions, observe and test. During this process,
customer responses and behaviors are recorded.
Some problems need to be overcome such as:
- Can't find the person to ask
- The person who needs to ask rejects to participate in the answer
- Dishonest, unenthusiastic, prejudiced answers
- Subjectivity of the researcher
3. Synthesize and analyze collected data:
▪ Use software such as Excel, SPSS, Minitab, ... to create graphs visually
to make the data analysis process easier and give businesses the fastest
and most accurate results.
▪ Writing reports, concluding issues, summarizing, and presenting results.

4. Assessment of market situation, current capacity, trend identification:

It is necessary to sit down to consider whether the results have solved the
problem of the business or not and apply the results to develop strategy and
marketing for VR Tourism.