The concept of the overall tourism product is central to understand the meaning and practice of marketing management in all sectors of the travel and tourism industry.
It has important implications for the marketing of commercial organisations and national and regional tourist offices; it is also highly relevant for planning and development, both in its community aspects and as a focus of feasibility studies for commercial organisations.
Products are defined as anything that can be offered to a market for attention, acquisition, use or consumption that might satisfy a want a need. It includes physical objects, services, persons, places, organisations, and ideas.
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As such, product decisions in any industry, not only tourism, are the forced point of all marketing activity, around which the other aspects of the marketing mix (pricing, promotion, and distribution) are organised.
Many variables make up the regional marketing mix. These can be grouped into the four P’s: product, price, place and promotion. However, the characteristics of tourism are somewhat different to many of the products that have been the traditional.
The product is not transported to the consumer, rather the tourist travel to the destination area where the product is experienced.
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The cost of transporting products to markets are an important for most producers but, in the case of tourism and for some market segments, the journey may be a positive part of the trip and there may be an incentive to travel an additional distance to acquire an unaccustomed or unusual experience.
Tourism’s product not only includes the salient attributes of the regional tourism offering, but also management of the regional tourism products over their life cycles, managing the development of new tourism products, and developing appropriate product strategies. Place is concerned with distribution. The appropriate channels and institutions should be used to give the tourism the most effective access to the regional tourism product.
Promotion communicates the benefits of the regional tourism offering to the potential tourists and includes not only advertising, but also sales promotion, public relations and personal selling.
The right and appropriate regional promotion mix must be developed where each of these promotional techniques are used as needed.
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Price is a critical variable in the regional marketing mix. The right price must both satisfy tourists and meet the profit objectives of tourism business in the region.
Package tour products will be broken down into different types to suit the identified needs of consumers. Typically, these will fall into the categories of escorted and unescorted tours, and group tour bookings.
Significantly, branding plays a very important role in tourism marketing, car rental firms, hotel chains and airlines in particular employ tremendous efforts to ensure that their name is widely recognised and synonymous with quality, value or some other characteristic.
Travel agents and tour operators depend on reputation to a large extent, and so it is imperative that they have a strong, recognisable identity.
The Promotional Mix in the Tourism Context Falls into Three Main Categories:
(a) To inform,
(b) To remind, and
(c) To persuade.
It will always be necessary to inform potential consumers about new products, and services and other related issues may heed to communicate to tourists; new uses, prices changes, information to build consumer confidence and to reduce fears, full descriptions of service offerings, image building etc. are a few examples.
Similarly, consumers may need to be reminded about all these types of issues, especially in the off peak season. Promotional designs will help in persuasion of prospective consumers (tourists).
Pricing in tourism is a fairly complex issue because the price eventually said by the consumer may be made up from the prices changed by various independent service providers in the case of a package tour. Therefore, pricing policy decisions should be distinct by strategic objectives.
Distribution management is concerned with two things (a) availability; and (b) accessibility. If tourism marketing management is to be certain that their products and services are both available and accessible to the target market, they must design a channel strategy that will be effective.