Analysis of Tour Operations Management: Case Study of Trailfinders

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Tour Operations Management
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Table of Contents
Introduction......................................................................................................................................3
Task 1...............................................................................................................................................4
Task 2...............................................................................................................................................7
Task 3.............................................................................................................................................11
Task 4.............................................................................................................................................15
Conclusion.....................................................................................................................................18
Bibliography..................................................................................................................................19
Appendix........................................................................................................................................22
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Introduction
The tour operations are rapidly evolving in the tourism market. The different types of tour
operations are domestic tours, outbound tours and inbound tours. The tour operators need to
comprehend the prevalent trends and developments, which marks the tourism industry. The
tourism industry needs to devise different strategies for enhancing the quality of products and
catering the needs of customers. Trailfinders is one of the leading tour operators in UK.
Trailfinders must analyse the current trends and developments, which affects the tourism
industry. Further, the organisation designs luxury coach and educational tour for adult students
and for it need to design the stages involved planning the tour. Moreover, the tour operators
markets their products using different means like brochures, which needs to be designed based
on various elements. Therefore, the tour operators have to implement strategic decisions as well
as tactical strategies according to different situations.
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Task 1
1.1 Analyse the effects of current and recent trends and developments on the tour
operators industry.
The tour operators must analyse the prevalent trends of the tour industry. The tour operators
differ from based on its operations. The major tour operators are as follows:
Outbound operators: The tour operators are known to promote the different kinds of tours like
leisure travels or business related tours. These operators market their tours to outside the nation,
as to foreign destinations. However, these operators need to keep track of different facilities like
accommodations, transportation, and many more (Mwesiumo and Halpern, 2018). Therefore,
outbound operators are increasing in numbers in rapid succession.
Domestic operators: The domestic operators is responsible for making arrangements for
different facilities like transportation, accommodation, sight visits, recreational activities and
various others services for domestic tourists. These operators require understanding the
customers’ preference before making the arrangements.
Inbound operators: These tour operators are referred as ‘ground tour operators’. The people
have knowledge about the local destination and tourism products. The primary role of these
operators is to promote the local tourism products on global scale via distributors. Hence, the
tour operators are considered reliable source for making tour plans because of its power to reach
out to the overseas markets.
With changing years, the type of tourists is changing. The new type of tourists can be-
independent tourists, single tourists or individual tourists, business tourists, mature travellers.
Moreover, various trends can influence the tourism industry, which are noted to be as follows:
Dynamic Packaging
Dynamic packaging can be defined as the approach wherein the tourists make own planning
through arranging for accommodations, transportation and recreational bookings. The customers
are known to be well versed with the technology and they research about different destinations
on own. The tourists uses internet for researching as well as to make bookings in hotels, airlines
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and other activities (Duke and Persia, 2015). The tour operators providing this ‘dynamic
packaging’ offer its tourists customers more flexibility and help them to choose in accordance to
their preferences. It allows the customers to create their dream packages by maintaining balance
between the hotel bookings, flight bookings, and other elements. This type provides benefits to
the travellers by letting them choose the best plans at affordable price. This also proves
advantageous for tour operators, as it enables them to attract more customers by being flexible.
ICT effect in tourism
Information Communication technologies is noted to play vital role in tourism industry as well as
hospitality industry. ICT facilitates the operations of the tour operators by making the operations
faster, as compared to normal way of operations. It enables the tourists to have access to any
tourism product with the use of internet irrespective of place or time. This benefits the tour
operators as well by enabling them to understand the trend and issue faced by the tourism
industry. Further, it helps the tour operators to reach out the target customers via various uses of
sources like mobile applications, web technologies and many more (Liang et al., 2017).
However, the emergence of ICT in tourism has created a balance of power between the suppliers
and tourists. This is because there is excessive availability of information. Further, the
technological assistance contribution in making payments online and connect to Online Trip
Advisor (Hsu et al., 2016).
World Wide Web in tourism
World Wide Web or commonly termed as Internet is greatest and most impactful trend, which
affects the tourism industry. Internet is umbrella, which encircles almost all the necessary
information required by the tour operators and the customers. ‘WWW’ or internet has made the
collaboration between the tour operators and customers as well as between the tour operators or
other service providers much easier and efficient. The customers or tourists have the access to
the different packages and information about the tourist destinations. On the other hand, the tour
operators have the access to different information related to the issues and rising trends in the
market. Therefore, Internet is considered a boon for the tour operators in order to develop.
Alternative tourism
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This trend in tourism can be referred to as juxtaposed form of mass or popular tourism.
Alternative tourism is rising as trend because it involves travelling, which has personal reasons
and includes interactions with the local community of the tourist destination. It can be considered
to be based on the values of society and community. The interaction, which marks the
uniqueness of Alternative tourism, allows both the hosts and community to enjoy positive and
friendly relations among one another. The alternative tourism includes forms of tourism like
adventure tourism, sports tourism, and eco-tourism. It also includes thematic tourism or enclave
tourism. These forms of tourism are completely opposite to the standard form of tourism (Kuilis-
Bosimin and Chan, 2018). Therefore, the tour operators develop several packages for catering to
this type of tourism. The packages such as niche tourism include adventure tourism or eco-
tourism, which caters to the new demands of the tourists. This form of tourism also has genuine
and differentiated products. Thus, the tourism helps the traveller to have different experience as
well as the tour operators to provide diverse range of services. Therefore, this trend in tourism is
evolving and has more demand in market.
Please refer to appendix
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Task 2
Introduction
The report will be focused on assessing several stages and the associated time scales involved in
the development of holidays. The suitability of the contracting methods for aiding and creating
holidays will be discussed. In addition, various tour operators working in tourism industries for
developing holidays will be listed. Lastly, the selling price of a holiday from an instance of
planning educational tour will be calculated.
2.1 Assess the stages and timescales involved in developing holidays
There are some stages involved in making and creating holidays. Thus, the tour operator
industries are working hard to attract the customers by implementing those stages. The
Trailfinders have been given a job of planning a luxury coach for an educational tour consisting
of fifty adult students who will be visiting Brussels and Bruges of Belgium from London. The
tour is supposed to be commenced in July 2020 and the duration will be six nights. Trailfinders
has made the following strategies to create a successful summer vacation for the students as
follows:
Market Research about the Destination: The primary objective of the market research is to
analyze several factors and data related to the tour packages. The market research program
involves researching the present tourist market and the available destinations (Ibrahim and Gill,
2015). This task would help in arranging tours and holidays for people. In case of the educational
tour Trailfinders, tour operator should identify the interests and ideas, and specializations
accordingly. In addition to, Trailfinders will assess and perform research on the potential market
too. It should also determine the political, social, economic, climatic, and geographic factors that
could affect the package tours in future.
Planning and Scheduling: A specialized workflow in planning the holidays would help the tour
operators largely. Planning and scheduling would be advantageous to utilize the existing
knowledge and improve solutions (Lim et al., 2018). Planning should be made in advance.
Planning is also required to estimate the available staffs and workers during July 2020.
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Therefore, Trailfinders in advance would make sure the number of available staffs and number
of staffs who will be off in that particular time.
First cum first served basis: The summertime during July of 2020 will be a very busy schedule
since it is a peak season in Belgium and there will be an overflowing crowd visiting Belgium.
Mostly, students will visit since they will have summer holidays at that time. Therefore,
Trailfinders, which is working 24/7 entire year would be busy too. Trailfinders can make some
strategies to limit the number of employees taking leaves. It can introduce a ‘first cum first basis
leave approval system’ to restrict a large number of employees from taking off (Reijnders, 2016).
The staffs going to take leaves may approach by giving an advance notification. These strategies
proved to be useful in many tour-operating industries in Trailfinders too.
Timescales involved in the educational tour organized by Trailfinders:
Serial No. Day Date and Time
of journey
Name of place Hotel
1. Day 1 20th July 2020 Belgium Holiday Inn
2. Day 2 21st July 2020 Mini Europe Holiday Inn
3. Day 3 22nd July 2020 Atomium Holiday Inn
4. Day 4 23rd July 2020 Manneken Pis Holiday Inn
5. Day 5 24th July 2020 Bruges-
Amsterdam
Holiday Inn
6. Day 6 25th July 2020 City Tour Holiday Inn
Table 1: Timescales of Educational Tour
(Source: created by the learner)
2.2 Evaluate the suitability of different methods of contracting for different components of
the holiday and different types of tour operator
Contracts are important in the tourism industry since it helps in arranging and buying different
components of tours (Hsu et al., 2016). The hotels represent the primary sources of generating
income. The hotel accommodation contracts are considered as the standard hospitality contracts
in the industry. Contracts are generally formulated advance a year ahead of the holiday seasons.
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The tour operators should estimate the load of tourists flowing in the season. This will help the
tour operators to make several essential contracts with the hotels, motels, restaurants, airlines,
luxury coaches, railways, visitors’ attraction places, etc. However, it is not possible to make
contracts too early since tour operators need to take proper decisions about marketing, sales,
product, and service research. They must be able to decision what should be included in their
tour package to build attractive holidays for people. There are different contracts such as follows:
Fixed contracts or Commitment: Booking system is available with this contract. Rooms
already booked on advance payment are beneficial to the tour operators. The reason is once the
seat or room is already booked means it is sold. Therefore, the tour operators receive money even
a seat is not sold. A fixed type of contract is actually permanent and it is considered as
employment contract that will be automatically terminated after the end of the specific event or
service (Bednarska, 2017). The conditions on which a fixed contract will end are:
 The expiry of a particular terms and conditions
 If the task is over
 The occurrence as well as non-occurrence of different events rather than attainment of
retirement
The main advantage of this contract is employers can get advantages from particular skills
without spending any cost to a long commitment. If any mistreatment occurs with the employees,
they can register lawful actions. The agencies, students, and apprentices in the professional
places are not falling under this type of contracts.
Ad-hoc contracts: The tour operators make the ad-hoc contracts in a mutually agreed cost of the
holidays or packaged tour (Youssef et al., 2018). The contracts usually do not give a guarantee
on the booking. Trailfinders should use the contract that would be helpful in making contracts
with the luxury coaches and the hotels. Such contracts can be utilized during overflowing of
tourists in a peak season. Thus, Trailfinders might operate in over booking condition too.
2.3 Calculate the selling price of a holiday from the given information above.
Grand Casselbergh has proposed the estimated cost of the educational tour in Bruges, Belgium.
The data provided in the assignment, the following calculations have been made to determine the
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selling price of summer vacation holidays for 50 students for six nights during July 2020. The
calculations have been made as on 3rd December 2018.
Numbers of
Student
Room rent
(twin room and
breakfast
combo
package)
(Euros)
Transport
(£)
Guide
Charges
(£)
Visitors
attraction/ person
(€)
50 89 6949 896 45.6
Euros Pounds/person Sub total
Students
number
50
Accommodation 89 78.61 3930.5
Transport 6949 6949
Guide Charges 896 791.42 791.42
Visitor Place 45.6 40.28 2014
Exchange rate 1.14 to 1
Grand Total 13684.92
Mark Up 28% 3831.77
Table 2: Calculation of selling price of the educational tour to Belgium
(Source: created by the learner)
Conclusion
In this report, the details of creating educational holiday by Trailfinders have been discussed.
The stages at different levels of tourism have been listed. The timescale designs made by
Trailfinders for a group of fifty adult students starting an educational tour from London to
Belgium have been scheduled. Various types of contracts in the business have been discussed,
and the implementations of those contracts on Trailfinders have been proposed. A calculation has
been made from the proposed estimation given by Trailfinders.
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Task 3
3.1 Evaluate the planning decisions taken for the design of a selected brochure
There is a range of different stages and decision planning, which is closely involved into
designing a prefabricated brochure from the perspective of Trailfinders. Those steps have been
enlisted below:
Conducting research and making feasible strategy: It can describe as the initial stage of
creating a brochure for Trailfinders. At this stage, information that are relevant with the selected
project has been collected through writing assignment brief, collecting background materials and
studying the legal issues regarding different brands (Liu and Chou, 2016). Expectation of the
client has to be considered while conducting this and it can be done through asking several
questions.
Concept designing: It is the second part of designing a brochure and it involves some
prefabricated designing process at several extensions. In this specific time, only different creative
processes are closely associated with it. It generally includes different combinations of bright
colors, attractive graphic designs, prefabricated usage of technology and attractive keywords.
After that, the initial concept has been turned up to be as close as a finished brochure. However,
the client satisfaction has to be considered as a top priority since it is the key aim of Trailfinders.
Developing detailed design: Any specific content can be developed further through the
implications of relevant details. Different mock ups and variations can be developed further
through the help of this development process. A prefabricated logo has been crafted through
diverse colors so that the webpage can attract lots of consumer base towards the company.
Photoshop has primarily created those websites and after that, it has been implemented through
HTML. Final costing and product planning has been done in this stage.
Implementation of plans: After the stage 3 process of creating broachers, Trailfinders can
conduct their implementation process. The developed and finished artwork of the broacher has
been crafted in this specific phase. PDF for those tasks has been created in this stage. However,
the help of professional programmers are required in order to create the prefabricated HTML
codes for creating the website of Trailfinders.
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