Exploring attractive messages in group package tour newspaper advertisements

The group package tour (GPT) is one of the main modes of outbound travel in many Asian countries and areas. In practice, most of the travel agencies utilise the newspaper to promote their GPTs. Although prior newspaper travel advertisements provided useful information, only single or a number of advertising messages were considered. In order to fill this gap, the primary objective of this study was to find out what types of message are attractive to the customers in the GPT advertisement from a holistic perspective. Both qualitative and quantitative methods, with 400 usable samples, were conducted for data analysis. Attractive messages for three different destinations (China, Japan and Thailand) with six clusters were profiled at component level. The findings reveal that messages of appeal, text, size and format design represent over 78% of the total percentage. Further implications for designing attractive messages in terms of a destination or cluster perspective are discussed.