Dr. Destination - Stanley Plog🎖️
The one who envisioned the future of travel industry
Everyone would have come across travel influencers through social media.
Can anyone of you name a travel researcher? 🤔
How many of you know about a travel researcher named Stanley Plog - who literally defined the tourism industry in every way possible.🔥
Biography💖
Stanley Clement Plog is a travel research specialist and consultant.
Career - Academia, consulting, market research, and entrepreneur.
Birth - Glendale, California, on April 12, 1930
Death - February 16, 2011
Hobbies - a trombone player in many popular music bands
Education🎓
Plog was a Phi Beta Kappa (PBK) and Magna cum Laude graduate of Occidental College, California, and also received his Doctorate in Social Sciences at Harvard University.💯
At UCLA, he was the founding academic director of the Training Program in Social Psychiatry and also created the Urban Observatory, a social problems study center.
Career✨
He founded several market research companies over a long career of 40 years, the best known of which was Plog Research, Inc, and was its Chairman and CEO which he sold in 1996.
The company deals with a broad segment of the travel industry, including airlines, hotel chains, destinations, cruise ships, rental car companies, and travel media. When he left Plog Research in 2002, he continued as a consultant.
He is often a speaker at major travel conferences globally, and a contributor to ASTA (American Society of Travel Advisors) Agency Management, Travel Weekly, and many publications.
Dr. Plog was also an editor for the Journal of Travel Research and the Cornell Hotel and Restaurant Administration Quarterly - a peer-reviewed academic journal in the field of hospitality management.
"Tell me who visits your destination, and I'll tell you whether it's in decline" - said Stanley C Plog.🎉
In the later periods, he operated as an independent consultant, with his previous company (now owned by NFO Worldwide), services, and online research company (Equation Research).
His work included positioning and branding for destinations and travel companies, helping troubled travel providers and distributors determine core strengths for growth and profitability, and evaluating the effectiveness of advertising and promotional programs.
The destination rating techniques and strategies he had built provided the underpinning for his latest business enterprise, a Website called BestTripChoices.com, of which he was the co-founder.
He was able to turn around destinations and resort areas that face declining revenues.🚀
Psychographic Model📈
According to the ‘Psychographic Theory’ of Stanley. C. Plog, the popularity of a destination will rise and fall over time and also classified the personality traits which would drive one to a specific destination.
A bell curve was proposed by him in which different personalities belonged in different proportions - allocentric, mid-centric, psychocentric.
You can read more about it here.
Books & Awards 📚
Plog has written 4 books in the social sciences and 3 books on travel.
The travel books are as follows -
Leisure Travel: Making It a Growth Market Again (1991)
Vacation Places Rated (1995)
Leisure Travel: A Marketing Handbook (2004).
For decades, he did identify key travel trends, often devising the very names to describe various travel behaviors.🤩
These travel personality types are used in books and other publications by Plog to discuss how to develop new destination areas that will maintain their allure for a long period of time, how to improve or reposition current ones, and how to advertise and market more efficiently to specific psychographics (personality-based) segments (e.g. Plog 1991).
He is often referred to as “Dr. Destination.”
He received the prestigious Alfred E. Koehl Lifetime Achievement Award for travel marketing from the Hospitality Sales & Marketing Association International (HSMAI) - an award to recognize the individuals who have made excellent contributions to the advancement of marketing in the hospitality industry.
His contribution has helped to scale the tourism industry exponentially in the upcoming years. He did explain every standpoint of the sector efficiently in every medium and remains an inspiration for everyone.
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