TOURISM AND TRAVEL DIPLOMA.

Running Head: TOURISM AND TRAVEL DIPLOMA 0
2019
Student name
3/23/2019
TOURISM AND TRAVEL DIPLOMA

TOURISM AND TRAVEL DIPLOMA 1
TOURISM AND TRAVEL
The tourism industry has been expanded to a greater extent due to changes in social
trends and technology. There are various stakeholders involved in this industry and working with
their individual and collective purpose and objective. For instance one of the most important
stakeholders is the customer, who is traveling around and providing business to the companies.
The major purpose of them is to enjoy the holidays and get the best services in price worth for
the kind of services they receive. They contact the retail travel agent to get those services from
traveling, staying, and to visit places. The retail agent’s major objective is to provide integrated
services to the customers for an additional charge over the actual service provided in the form of
commission.
The role of the retail travel agent would be to contact and arrange services from various
other parties like a tour operator, wholesaler and ticket consolidator in minimum price so as to
increase the margin for him. Here wholesalers purpose is to gain business opportunity and to
increase the customers to serve, for which it is responsible to contact the hotel group reservations
to find a perfect hotel for the customers and arrange hospitality services as per their demand and
contact destination management company to provide travel services to the customer through an
agent. Moreover, the tour operator purpose is to provide tour operating services like a tour guide
to the customer through an agent and lastly, ticket consolidator whose purpose is to provide
ticket arrangement services of airline or other mode of travel and related service to the customer
through an agent. However, the integrated purpose of all the stakeholders is to increase customer
comfort and satisfaction level through tourism experience (opentextbc, 2019).

TOURISM AND TRAVEL DIPLOMA 2
The customer is receiving different services through a retail travel agent in a managed
form. Through this it can be said that the agent is playing a vital role in this industry and in case
the process structure does not include the use of retail travel agent the customer experience
would be completely different. The customers would require contacting three different
companies to arrange the tourism services and need to spend time on searching the best tour
operator, ticket consolidator, and wholesaler. They would be responsible for tour schedules and
need to manage the services themselves. This could be responsible for a decrease in customer
satisfaction and an increase in the risk of approaching the wrong service providers further
(Guttentag, 2015).

TOURISM AND TRAVEL DIPLOMA 3
Bibliography
Guttentag, D. (2015). Airbnb: disruptive innovation and the rise of an informal tourism
accommodation sector. Current Issues in Tourism, 18(12), 1192-1217.
opentextbc. (2019). chapter-1-history-andoverview. Retrieved from opentextbc:
https://opentextbc.ca/introtourism/chapter/chapter-1-history-andoverview/