Madaba traveller’s personas

By Ayah Younis, Head of Exploration, UNDP Jordan Accelerator Lab

January 31, 2023

Since June 2022, the UNDP Jordan Accelerator Lab has been exploring, mapping, and experimenting with knowledge and solutions that could improve tourism in Madaba while creating income for the local community. We collected qualitative data typically unavailable to decision-makers. In this series, we will share the learning from these activities.

What do tourists want? This is a question that the Directorate of Tourism in Madaba asked, and we answered! We worked with a design research team to create eight traveller's personas of a sample from Saudi Arabia, Palestine, Lebanon, Egypt, France, Italy, German, the UK, the USA, India, and China. We based the sample on the top nationalities visiting Jordan or Madaba with an assumption of interest in Christian pilgrimage for Italians, Germans, British, Americans, Lebanese, Egyptians, Chinese, and Indians.

What is a traveller's person?

Personas help to focus decisions by understanding better what tourists search for in their travel and guiding those developing tourist products and services to address these preferences.

To build the personas, we ran a quantitative online survey, and the second was a qualitative method, individual interviews. First, we used a multilingual, closed-ended online survey tool. With the help of a marketing agency, the online survey was promoted on social media platforms, targeting the nationalities above. We received 249 responses from Arab countries, 197 from Asia, 262 from European, and 220 from the USA. The analysis helped us create portfolios of travellers, which we explored further in the second activity, the individual interviews. We ran 23 semi-structured one-on-one online interviews with participants from the eight nationalities and a couple of local key informant interviews with key stakeholders from the tourism sector in Madaba.

The data analysis and reporting phase was a thorough process that aimed to uncover the nature of the participants' travel personas and impressions of tourism in Jordan and Madaba. The data collected from different sources during the evaluation were triangulated to address the validity of answers using more than one source. We also referred to learnings we collected from other activities, such as the desk research, the sentiment analysis of TripAdvisor comments about Jordan, and the Arab tourists’ experiment. We analysed each item based on commonalities, patterns, and trends in the previously identified profiles and across the nationalities.

We created eight traveller personas that only represent the sample of the eight nationalities interviewed. At the same time, they could be generalised in a broader population, but such a generalisation remains limited. Despite this limitation, these personas help design tourist products.

Check the personas below and let us know which traveller you are!