Specifics of Travel Services as Opposed to Products and Services Provided in Other Industries - Essay Example

Tourism Product Report Strategy making plays a key role in any business that involves constant interplay between non-physical services. Travel and tourism is a business sector which is driven by a set of dynamic requirements that keep changing according to area of business, nature and worth of competitors, customer specifications and so on. These requirements shape the objective of a travel and tourism agency dealing with tourism products. Products in common business terminology refer to goods and services. Goods are tangible, physical materials that can be shifted from one place to another. On the other hand, tourism product can be defined as a service that can only be put to some use for deriving benefits. There are a number of features which are of relevance to the way in which travel and tourism products are managed and differentiated from physical goods. These include intangibility, inseparability, perishability, heterogeneity, and ownership (Evans et al. 2003:1994). Intangibility of tourism products makes this business diversified yet accessible to all. Unlike goods, services such as accommodation in a luxury hotel and cruising to an exotic island cannot be bought in physical terms. In other words, these services can only be used by customers and service providers alike. Customers make use of them for fulfilling their purpose of travelling whereas service providers put them to use for making profits. In either way, they cannot be physically located but be experienced only. Baum (2006) argues that in a culturally diversified setup, the intangibility of tourism products enables tour operators and travel agents to adjust to the varying demands of visitors (151). They can increase the stake of services, wherever necessary, to optimise revenues. At the same time, the invisibility phenomenon associated with intangible service products poses some major challenges to overcome. Intangibility itself is an attribute that sometimes appears vague and superfluous. Unless the service itself proves its worth, potential customers may completely or partially ignore it. To take away the equivocation, tour operators usually apply tangible means to promote their services to target customers. This is why video clippings of holiday destinations or cruise ship tours are uploaded on the web to lure in customers into availing of the services. Similarly, tour organisers spend time and money to make creative and visually appealing travel brochures to minimise the uncertainty factor involved with intangibility. Inseparability of tourism products is again a feature that sets such products apart from ordinary business outcomes. Tourism products are inseparable in that they are produced and consumed at the same time. The challenge met by tour operators in this regard is that they hardly get enough opportunity to better the services refers to that the production and consumption of services are inseparable. Inseparability implicates that bidirectional interaction needs to be followed for endpoint product delivery, so that customers feel satisfied about the quality of services provided to them by the firm. It is imperative to develop comprehensive training methodologies by the concerned tour operator to teach its staffs how to interact effectively with a diverse blend of customers (Page and Connell 304). Therefore, it is clear that the main difficulty of this attribute is concerned with meeting specific customer requirements. Since direct verbal involvements with customers can give an immediate cue to their level of satisfaction, tour operators’ task is more difficult than manufacturers’. In real world service sectors, every process must be streamlined with perfection on the first go, otherwise the company might have to forsake valuable customers. Baum (2006) holds that inseparability has important implications for the management of quality in the tourism and hospitality industries, in that the level of checks and inspection characteristic of the manufacturing sector cannot be applied (85). Perishability is an important element to feature in sustainable approaches to tourism management. Pender and Sharpley (2005) define perishability as an attribute which prevents a particular service from being in effect after a certain period of time. It implicates that a tourism product of perishable nature cannot be sold once it’s expired (104). Referring to how this phenomenon impacts tourism industries, Biju (2006) cites an example of adverse seasonal conditions when travellers give up on visiting their prescheduled destinations. Bulk cancellation of tours implies that tour operators will have to abandon tourism products that are relevant to perishability (96). Other examples of perishability of produced services may include unreserved or unsold seats on long-haul modes of transportation, unreserved accommodation at hotels or unsold holidays that can never be resold at a later time. The problems of perishability can be made even more acute by wavering standards of demand set in contrast with a constant supply line. Demand can vary during the day, during the week or on a seasonal basis. Capacity to produce services may not tally with the line of demand during busy seasons, but the same may turn out to be more than adequate during times when number of visitors drop off. Problems seem more intricate when extent of economic activities in a particular place undergoes a recessive period. Following the dreadful share market collapse immediately after 9/11, tourism industries in the West suffered a shocking and unprecedented setback as number of global visitors dropped off remarkably from usual percentage. Contrary to the wavering nature of demand, supply, however, is much more difficult to alter, at least in the short term. For instance, an accommodation venue has a fixed bed stock that it has to try to fill. Similarly, a scheduled airline has an obligation to fly between advertised points regardless of the number of empty seats on the aircraft. A tour operator has the liability to fill a certain specified number of rooms or seats on a aircraft or a cruise ship. The challenge is that the operator must sign the obligatory contract well in advance of the scheduled commencement of the tour. So if any change occurs due to one or more of the aforementioned unforeseen circumstances occur, the concerned tour operator does not have the choice to back off by cancelling the terms of agreement it has signed previously. Hospitality sectors worldwide operate on the presupposition that they have to handle customers hailing from all strata of cultural, social and economic backgrounds. Preferential treatment of tourism products cannot be done away with. This implies that each individual has opinions different from another. So tour operators need to constantly provide customisable services befitting to personalised demands of every visitor. Academic literature on the matter of heterogeneity has focussed a great deal on personal choice model. This model works under the assumption that parameters of need for tourists vary according to what is being offered to them (Liu 2006:101). In other words, tourists learn to make choices by examining carefully the list of services offered by various travel agencies. They can discard a particular operator if its services are not up to the mark. To counter the problems with heterogeneity, travel organisations must ensure that its employees display proficient customer relation skills all the time. Similarly, the company has no control over the behaviour of the customer. Customer behaviour may be interpreted as an element which is independent of company norms and goodwill. What it implies is that arriving at a mutual point of agreement or disagreement is impossible with the twofold approach to heterogeneity. But from business perspectives, it is important for a firm to try to hold as much authority as possible to building an easy and comfortable ambience for both its employees and the customers they serve. Therefore, a travel agency or tour operator needs to obtain as much information as possible regarding the background of its potential customers. Such background checking will enable the service provider to plan and implement cursory changes to their preset norms of customer relationship management. It would be an additional feather to their inventory if they can regulate an element which is essentially beyond their reach. Ownership or lack of it can do wonders to retail travel chains. Having an ownership advantage allows the hotel enterprise to gain prerequisite knowledge about its customers. Moreover, it allows them to plan in advance regarding a number of business areas that are relevant to meeting customer necessities (Woodside and Martin 2007:285). In essence, problems faced by international travel agencies are galore. But in most of the cases, those problems are mobilised as much as possible to countermine their probable effects upon the normal functioning of the industry. While tourism management practices focus rigorously on the theoretical coefficients of this industry and try to integrate the literature finding with analysis of empirical evidences, it is the real managers who ultimately share the all important responsibility of implementing all these parameters, along with many others, to effectively boost the sector in financial as well as entertainment aspects. List of References Baum, T. (2006) Human resource management for tourism, hospitality and leisure: an international perspective. North Way, Andover: Cengage Learning EMEA Biju, M. R. (2006) Sustainable Dimensions of Tourism Management. New Delhi: Mittal Publications Evans, N., Campbell, D., and Stonehouse, G. (2003) Strategic management for travel and tourism. Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann Liu, T. V. (2006) Tourism management: new research. Hauppauge, New York: Nova Publishers Page, S., and Connell, J. (2006) Tourism: a modern synthesis. North Way, Andover: Cengage Learning EMEA Pender, L., and Sharpley, R. (2005) The management of tourism. City Road, London: SAGE Woodside, A. G., and Martin, D. (2007) Tourism management: analysis, behaviour and strategy. Cambridge, Massachusetts: CABI Read More