Travel Agency Business Strategy Analysis

Another threat was coming up from airline industry where they with the help of E commerce started to provide products and services to the customer directly without the travel agents who where a strong bound between airline and customers before the penetration of internet. This in turn led to restructuring of travel agents operational behaviour and even their value proposition which made them differ from others.(Barnett and Standing, 2001)

For any industry, especially for competitive industry like travel industry value proposition plays a key role in creating their business strategy. However, Kaplan and Norton as in frow (2001) argues that value proposition is ‘‘the essence of strategy of a company’’ it represents the core strategy of the company.(Frow

(O’Connor, 2008) Travel agents are no longer strangers to modern technologies. Travel agents presently use internet for managing reservations, accounting as well as inventory management systems.(Standing and Vasudavan, 1999) It is a very noticeable fact that travel agents nowadays try to maximise their productivity by involving themselves in collaborative product development with their partners. The industry focus on more customer relationship to sustain competitive advantage. Customer competence in the market can be considered as a key resource which helps the industry to attain this.(Ku, Yang and Huang, 2013) The operating method of a travel agencies are influenced heavily by innovation facility resources by the travel agencies, this can be explained with an example of a manager of a travel agents implements new idea in there operational structure to reduce cost without destroying customer satisfaction.(ibid) Also the new trend which is flowed by the travel agents are database marketing. It is generally building up information or data of customer so that they can communicate to their target audience more precisely(Oppermann,

2) What are the current marketing strategies adopted by the travel agents?

3) What are the main market segments focused by the industry now and before?

04.03 What type of literature is this?

(e.g. theoretical, research, practice, policy? are there links with other types of literature?)

This is a research article as it clearly states the result of data collection of the report. Which is used to identify the strategic pattern of travel agents in the study. Moreover, the report holds two table which calculates the useage of travel agents for travel purpose now a days.

04.04 What sort of intellectual project for study is being undertaken?

(a) How clear is it which project the authors are undertaking? (e.g. knowledge-for-understanding, knowledge-for-critical evaluation, knowledge-for-action, instrumentalism, reflexive action?)

The text is very clear as it helps in gaining knowledge- for- understanding the research topic more in detail for the