Impact Of Current Trends And Developments On Tourism Industry Essay.

Task 1

1.Examine the recent trends and developments in the tour operations industry with a brief analysis of the type of holidays taken, the emerging popular destination and the effects of current and recent trends and developments on the tour operators industry.

Task 2

A. Assess the stages and timescales in developing holiday packages and prepare an itinerary for a combined heritage, wildlife and beach holiday and develop a package in stages.

B. Evaluate the suitability of different methods of contracting the various components of the holiday for different types of tour operators when developing holidays. (P2.1; P2.2) Department of Travel, Tourism and Hospitality Management

C. Carryout the cost of the components of the package and calculate the selling price of your holidays

Task 3

A. Design and plan a brochure and evaluate the process and planning decisions for the proposed brochure, as well as assess the suitability of alternative methods (nontraditional) of communication and promotion for different types of tour operator. (P3.1; P3.2)

B. Analyse and Evaluate the non-traditional methods of distribution that can be used to sell holiday packages for different types of tour operator

Task 4

For this task, you need to consider yourself being promoted as a senior manager with a role of making strategic decisions. You should be in a position to evaluate the various strategies employed by the tour operators in the UK and set the agenda for future direction. This would involve the application of advanced technologies, including social media in marketing as well as understanding the economic reality of the country. Hint: Start with evaluating the emerging trends in the tour operations sector, with an emphasis on the UK market. Research and collect relevant materials and data about the travel and tourism sector and the companies engaged in tour operations in the UK.

A. Using the findings from task 1 in assignment 1, analyse the emerging trends in the UK tour operations sector and evaluate how the various tour operators (competitors) responded to these trends (P4.1).

B. Briefly examine the differences between tactical and strategic decisions, identify and compare some of the tactical decisions that could have taken by your chosen tour operator in different situations.
 

Increased Power of Spending

A. A brief investigation of the kind of occasions taken, the rising famous goal and the impacts of present and late patterns and improvements in the tourism industry

The tourism industry has gained utmost importance in the current scenario since it is one of the main sources of revenue for the economic structure of a country (Sy 2015). Throughout these years, the industry has been growing at an increasing rate and much development has been made. Some of the current trends and developments and their impacts are:

• The Technological Development – The growth in the tourism industry is dependable on the new and updated technological advancements. Majority of the travellers’ uses the internet these days by which they search for the best deals and packages in their favourite or upcoming holiday destination (Han and Hyun 2015). Travellerscan book tickets online and also check the status of their bookings whenever they want via online apps. Facilities provided by the increasing advancement in the technology showered a positive impact on the tourism industry.
• Holiday Packages – In the current scenario, more new companies are coming up in the tourism market. They are providing attractive holiday packages that are customizable according to the requirements of the travellers or the customers. The customers can now choose from a variety of option and they are flexible in selecting their preferences according to their budgets and choices. The main target of the tourism industry is to provide optimum satisfaction to the customers.
• Tourism Marketing – In the tourism industry, the emergence and development of marketinghave helped the industry to flourish and attract more customers (Gretzel et al. 2015). Marketing helps travellers to know and gain knowledge about the services they will be provided by the tour company in their upcoming holiday destination.

Increased power of spending – In case of developing and developed countries, travellers with a higher range of income levels tend to spend on tour and travels. The tourism industry gets benefited from the international travellers due to the increase in spending.

The PESTEL Factors-These factors are very specific and significant in developing the tourism industry since the environmental, technological, social and political factors of a country decide the growth rate of its tourism industry (Han and Hyun 2015). Travellers prefer destinations that are clean, eco-friendly, equipped with modern technologies and have political stability.

The economy- The rising market of the tourism industry has been beneficial for the local community people in terms of socio-economic development. The industry generates humungous job opportunities which are beneficial for the local communities (Sy 2015). Besides, the industry generates significant profits to its stakeholders.

Customer Satisfaction- One of the essential factors for the tourism industry is the customer satisfaction. This is because it decides the future of the business industry. Positive experiences of a customer result in positive word of mouth and attract newer customers for the business (Schuckert, Liu and Law 2015). Recruitment of efficient workforce will increase the chances of better quality hospitality which may result in higher chances of customer satisfaction.

Assess the phases in creating occasion packages and set up a schedule for a consolidated heritage, natural life and beach occasion and build up a itinerary in stages.

For the development of a good tour plan, good and effective planning should be some since it includes a wide range of analysis like the location, needs of the customers, research activities, and terms of negotiation with the service providers. Stages of the development of the holiday packages include some of the key activities like careful examination of the destination place, research of the destination, negotiation, development of the tour, pricing and financial evaluation, marketing tour packages, tour operator’s brochure and post tour management (Fotis 2015).

Travel itinerary outlines all the elements of the upcoming trip, starting from hotel stops to destinations. Developing a travel itinerary helps to build an entire structure (Baratynskiy and Pyshkin 2015). It further helps in execution of the entire trip plan in an efficient and organized manner. The stages include: 

Planning and mapping of the itinerary

Organizing the itinerary

Analyze the suitability of various methods for contracting the different components and factors of holiday while developing tour packages for different tour operators.

PESTEL Factors

While designing the tour packages two methods are generally adopted by the tour operators. These are fixed contract method and sale only contract method.

Fixed contract method: This method is availed by the service providers in case of offseason sale shortage (Chen et al. 2015). In this process, the service providers’ charges for the volume based capacity to maximize the revenue. Since high volume of people seeks tour packages, so higher discounts are offered in these types of contracts. This enables the tour operator to enjoy a higher rate of customers for the tour packages.

Sale only contract: As compared to the fixed contracts, these contracts generally have a higher cost rate. This is because they are constructed or made in the lean season. These contracts are designed as per the requirements of the targeted customers and the un-utilized capacity is generally ignored ( Haddadi and Khodadadpoor 2015). These contracts focus on the prospective consumers and include other facilities with higher cost rates. These contracts are somewhat risky since there lies a risk of weak responses for the specially designed tour packages.

Both the contracts have their share of merits and demerits ( Baratynskiy and Pyshkin 2015). The fixed contract method includes higher rates of discounts, pre-decided rates of profit while the sale only contracts targets on the customers and the reduction of the fund wastage.

Plan out the cost of the different factors in the package and calculate the cost required in your holiday tour.

The Serial Number	The Details of the package	The Price per person	The Price per couple
1	· Taxi fare to airport	£ 30	£ 55
2	· Airplane ticket charges	£ 130	£ 240
3	· Transportation Local · By Taxi · By Bus · By Coach · Representative Visit	£ 35 £ 10 £ 12 £ 100	£ 55 £ 19 £ 23 £ 143
4	· Hotel Bookings	£ 89	£ 160
5	· Car rental for sightseeing	£ 40	£ 75
6	· Fun sports	£ 25	£ 46
7	· Heritage property visit tickets charges	£ 10	£ 15
8	· Restaurants Charges	£ 100	£ 180
	· Total Cost	£ 581	£ 1011

Analyze the procedure and decision planning for the itinerary and the proposed brochure. Assess the alternative methods of communication and promotion for different types of tour operator.

Brochures are generally used by the tourism and travel industries as a medium to initiate communication with the clients or the customers about the tour packages (Oppewal, Huybers and Crouch 2015). The brochure of the famous Thomas Cook can be taken. The distribution of the brochure is generally done to covey the knowledge of the tour packages to a maximum number of people and to make them aware of the attractive price ranges at a very low cost. It is essential to go through the entire procedure of the planning, organizing and implementing activities while going through the planning phase for designing the brochures (Mowforth and Munt 2015). Some of the decisions in the process include issue identifications that affect the planning of the decision making procedure, formatting of the brochure, consideration of the budgets and target towards the market and time limits. 

Economy

State and explain the non-traditional methods of allocation that can be utilized for selling holiday packages for different categories of tour operator 

There are numerous alternatives to the traditional brochures. The tour operator attracts large numbers of customers and clients with varied new options. With the increasing technological development, electronic vouchers seem to be one of the easiest ways to initiate communication and attract new customers throughout the globe (Oppewal, Huybers and Crouch 2015). An attractive and well-designed voucher will surely make the customers curious about the tour offerings (Salim 2017). These new and modern alternatives to the traditional voucher will surely attract newer customers to the business. Use of the online methods for developing and designing brochures will help the tourism operator to reach a large number of population and cove larger networks (Haddadi and Khodadadpoor 2015). This will enhance more rate of revenues for the business. Besides these, electronic brochures are cheap and fast for reaching to the large number of the population across the globe. The visual images that are contained in the e-brochures are visually more appealing and tend to have a clear and good impact on the understanding of the viewers (Ballantyne, Moutinho and Rate 2018). Besides this, another alternative to the traditional brochure is the visual brochure or the video brochure. These can be developed by the online methods and are easy to be marketed by the marketing tools of the internet for further promotion. Besides this, video brochure includes system facilities and visual images of the desired destinations. These are very cheap and can be easily distributed and uploaded to social media channels for the easy access of the people in the globe. Furthermore, these brochures initiate very fast promotions throughout the world (Oppewal, Huybers and Crouch 2015). It is thus advised that final brochures should be developed with the inclusion of all the relevant modern features and the combined benefits of all the types of the brochures so that it gets attractive and easily approachable for the customers worldwide. 

Response of the various tour operators or competitors to the emerging trends. Analysis of the proposed strategic decisions.

The Tour operators make numerous strategic decisions in their business. These decisions are taken in their daily business routine and can be regarding development and design of the brochures, the decision for price fixations, selection of the method of distribution and customer segment identification. To run the business of travel and tourism hassle-free, it is essential to have a quick decision making capability for the production of better results and better image in the competitive business market. Some of the key strategic decisions include Segmenting, Focusing, and Positioning, Discount pricing strategy, Seasonal Aspects, Competitive pricing strategy, Strategies related to the promotion (Huertas?Garcia, Laguna García and Consolación 2014).

Customer Satisfaction

State the differences among tactical and strategic decisions, identify and note some of the tactical decisions which could have been opted by your chosen tour operator in different situations 

The strategic and the tactical decisions differ in several ways. The strategic decisions are the widescreen view and the tactical strategies are closer up views. The strategic decisions help an organization to look outward; the primary purpose of the strategic decisions is to provide helpful information to the users regarding the policies (Abrate and Viglia 2016). Tactical strategies, on the other hand, investigate the current scenario and provide the users only the information they require to carry out the existing policy initiatives.

Various tactical decisions are made in the business which includes negotiation with the services, accommodation or lodging arrangements and other facilities. In the current scenario, explore and regal drive can be taken as an example (Mowforth and Munt 2015). These are the two main water games in the beach holiday tour packages. The total mechanism of the decision making procedure can be explained by some of the following steps: 

Firstly, all the service providers are listed for the proposed services. Secondly, proposals are sent to the service providers for the invitation of quotations. Thirdly, the most suitable quotation is selected in accordance with the budgets that are pre defined. Finally, personal meetings should be done with the service providers for the issues related to price stability and service qualities (Huertas?Garcia, Laguna García and Consolación 2014).

One of the major factors in the tactical decision making is the collection of feedback and assessment of the experiences of the customers. 

References

Abrate, G. and Viglia, G., 2016. Strategic and tactical price decisions in hotel revenue management. Tourism Management, 55, pp.123-132.

Ballantyne, R., Moutinho, L., and Rate, S. 2018. Consumer behaviour in tourism. Strategic Management in Tourism, CABI Tourism Texts, 73.

Baratynskiy, A. and Pyshkin, E., 2015, October. Traveler guide assistant: Introducing an application for an openstreetmap based travel itinerary construction. In Proceedings of the International Workshop on Applications in Information Technology (IWAIT-2015), The University of Aizu. The University of Aizu Press (pp. 25-28).

Chen, Q., Xia, B., Jin, Z., Wu, P.,and Hu, Y. 2015. Choosing appropriate contract methods for design-build projects. Journal of Management in Engineering, 32(1), 04015029.

Fotis, J. N. 2015. The Use of social media and its impacts on consumer behaviour: the context of holiday travel (Doctoral dissertation, Bournemouth University).

Gretzel, U., Sigala, M., Xiang, Z., and Koo, C. 2015. Smart tourism: foundations and developments. Electronic Markets, 25(3), 179-188.

Haddadi, M., and Khodadadpoor, M. 2015. The Role of Public Private Partnership Contracts in Tourism Industry Development. Tehran: Journal of Academic Research in Economics and Management Sciences, 4(1).

Han, H., and Hyun, S. S. 2015. Customer retention in the medical tourism industry: Impact of quality, satisfaction, trust, and price reasonableness. Tourism Management, 46, pp.20-29.

Huertas?Garcia, R., Laguna García, M., and Consolación, C. 2014. Conjoint analysis of tourist choice of hotel attributes presented in travel agent brochures. International journal of tourism research, 16(1), pp.65-75.

Mowforth, M., and Munt, I. 2015. Tourism and sustainability: Development, globalisation and new tourism in the third world. Routledge.

Oppewal, H., Huybers, T., and Crouch, G. I. 2015. Tourist destination and experience choice: A choice experimental analysis of decision sequence effects. Tourism Management, 48, pp. 467-476.

Salim, M. A. M. 2017. Enhancing destination image on tourism brochure of Barru Regency Sulawesi Selatan, Indonesia: A tourism discourse perspective. Turizam: me?unarodni znanstveno-stru?ni ?asopis, 65(2), pp. 247-257.

Schuckert, M., Liu, X., and Law, R. 2015. Hospitality and tourism online reviews: Recent trends and future directions. Journal of Travel & Tourism Marketing, 32(5), pp.608-621.

Sy, A. 2015. Trends and developments in African frontier bond markets. Brookings Institution Global Views Policy Paper, 1.