Abstract
Nowadays, the sustainability plays an important role in developing marketing in tourism, both from the theoretical and from the practical aspect. Sustainable marketing considers the general principles of marketing, with respect to sustainability as a new focus for a long-lasting customer relationship. Therefore, the business marketing in tourism should consider the importance of perceptions and expectations of tourists as final consumers. Regarding different marketing elements with sustainable aspect, this paper aims at investigating consumers’ perceptions of foreign tourists in Republic of Macedonia. In order to provide tourist perceptions and expectations, a survey based research was conducted among 254 foreign tourists in four cities in Republic of Macedonia, concerning aspects as: tourist perceptions of marketing elements of the current tourist offering and their expectations towards sustainable tourism development. For this purpose, statistical methods have been used as: Hi2-test, Student’s t-tests as well as correlation and Anova, using a specific program STAT FOR WINDOWS and STATA 11 for descriptive statistics of demographic characteristics of the sample.
The paper presents the main findings from the literature, drawing conclusions from the empirical research and providing recommendations for future academic and business research. Considering the specifics of different target segments, results from this research are presenting the need for lower pricing, increased promotional activities using social media, providing online booking and development of ecotourism.