Abstract

Tourist ports are the key structures for boating activities and, in particular, for nautical tourism. They are a large and fast-growing industry, especially as regards the so-called marinas, which are port infrastructures expressly built for nautical tourism. Despite the increasing relevance of marinas, literature has only very partially explored their management and marketing. In particular, little attention has been paid to the segmentation of marinas customers, leaving marinas managers without academic guidelines in this activity. To fill this gap, we approach marinas as tourism service firms – that offer an integrated system of services to boaters – and propose a benefit segmentation technique where the perceived importance of a wide set of services and features of the marina is used as a segmentation variable. The methodology is then applied in a pilot empirical study performed on a vast sample of marinas customers with an online survey. The 345 collected responses – analyzed with a principal component analysis and a clustering exercise – identify five segments of customers, well-distinguished in terms of benefits sought and, consequently, of importance paid to the various components of the marinas offer. The study shows relevant implications for both researchers and practitioners. Scholars are provided with a reflection on the role and features of marinas, especially in terms of the structure of their customer base; an innovative tool for benefit segmentation is also proposed, which may open the way to further studies in the field. Marina managers could be instead interested in the analysis of the value-creating elements of the offer of a marina; the mapping of the customer segments may also support them in the development of the marinas marketing strategies.