Tour Operations Management - Essay Example

The most important aspects of a holiday usually coordinated by a tour operator include the type of travel, transfers, excursions, facilities among other services. One easiest way to distinguish tour operators from other practitioners like travel agents is by establishing their form and features. A tour operator will, for this reason, bring together various subsets of tourism experience and offer it as a package. A package offered by tour operators is usually referred to inclusive tour. Inclusive tour mostly includes at least two elements often offered at an inclusive sale price and will encompass a stay of move for more than twenty-four hours in overnight accommodation.

These elements range from transportation, foods, accommodation to other tourist services. The kind and variety of packages in a given market is mostly categorized into two categories, that is, those that use the traditional charter flight and those using booked flights. Booked flights are mainly used when it is considered uneconomic for tour operator to purchase charter flights. The types of package in a tour operators industry is also often categorized according to a mode of travel or mode of accommodation (Chauhan, 2009).

In the case of mode of travel, the package involves issues like coach holiday or ferry. Mode of travel can also be based on ion twin transport packages like fly-drive, which are mostly popular with inbound tourist in the United States of America (Negi, 2006). Segmentation by mode of accommodation on the other hand is where hotels chains assumes the role of tour operators by packaging their excess capacity to offer weekends or short breaks in business attractions as in the case of inclusive package.

An inclusive tour can also be segmented according to whether they are domestic or international, according to the length of the holiday, distance and destination type (Gupta, 2012).