Relook at packaged tour business: Cornell study
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A new report on the packaged-travel business by Cornell’s Center for Hospitality Research says travel agencies should focus on individual customers and small groups, especially those who use the web to assemble their own custom tour packages.
The authors of “Travel Packaging: An Internet Frontier” said that tour packages are still being assembled and sold in the traditional fashion.
“We see both promise and problems for packaged-travel vendors,”‘ said William Carroll, one of the authors.
“The great promise of the Internet is in evolving web 2.0 applications, where vendors can offer travel elements based on customers’ wishes, as expressed online in social networking activities.”
The problem, he said, was connectivity, because “true dynamic packaging requires information systems that permit real-time inventory exchange between travel suppliers and packagers”.
Another author, Robert Kwortnik, pointed out that vendors should seek to enhance customers’ value perceptions by offering, what he called, “integrated, high value packages”. “While integrated packages should help offset price transparency, we also note that any of the participants in this process can become competitors, by offering their own packages, even as they work together to create consumer value.”
The authors have offered a detailed framework and checklist to examine what drives search and shopping, consumption, and evaluation of travel packages.
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