A Report on Travel Agencies

Executive Summary
The purpose of this report is to indicate to the reader, about the current market situation for the travel agency service industry, regarding opportunities and threats through the macro-environment, consumer behaviour decision making process, recommended marketing research, segmentation of target markets and the justifications, positioning strategies you should be using and what marketing objectives you should have and outlining all of these specifications through recommended strategic implications that you will need to implement as you start your new business.

This report is written Paul Edmonds & Vaughan Stevens who are current employed as apart of the STA Travel agency. The report is written for an indication, guidelines and recommendations for the client, for suggestions on how to start up a new travel agency. With the help of online databases such as IBIS and Passport GMID, as well as journal and newspaper articles for marketing and the some of the issues that are being dealt with in this industry in recent years. These offer a wide range of personal as well as professional reviews of the travel agency service industry, to provide information on the key components of research that is needed to be found.

The Scope of the report is to demonstrate how Paul & Vaughan should go about starting a new travel agency, what issues in the current market that will be beneficial to them and what issues may be a threat. The report outlines most recommended strategies for each of the three main sections that are, macro-environmental analysis, segmentation of your target market and profiling your segments. The report has acquired a number of credible resources as possible, using popular newspapers such as ‘The Herald Sun’ and ‘The Australian’, Internet sources, including ‘IBIS’, ‘Travel Trends’ and textbooks such as ‘Principles of Marketing’ and ‘Integrated marketing communications’ which all played its role into contributing to the compilation of this report.

There are a few key aspects that are outlined with the service and its competitors. The main aspects regard what the client should do to market their company, using the 7P’s of marketing. The service will be the most important factor of the client’s business. The service is to have two different target markets, for the younger and older generations, because there is a technological gap between the two so you cannot put them under the same category. Therefore your services need to meet the requirements of a traditional travel agency and the new aged Internet servicing for planning travel. The report describes briefly the selected criteria that the client is advised to follow through the marketing mix. Each of the key components is used to outline the strengths and weaknesses from the potential of your new business. The use of defining these key strategies is to obtain information of what is good and bad about these opportunity and threats you are presented with, and what can be improved to make it better, for the service to meet the expectations of consumers.

The conclusion & recommendations outlines the main strategies to follow, describing briefly how the service can exceed expectations of consumers by designing a well rounded, overall service. The main focus is to compare which of the 7P’s will be the most useful and important to concentrate on dealing with first and also what are your basic needs and goals to start off the business.

i Table of Contents

Executive Summary…...............................................................................................................i
Table of Contents…………………………………………….………………………………..ii
List of Figures/Tables………………......………………………………………………….…iii

1.0 Introduction……………….…………………………………………………………...1

2.0 Industry Definition…...……………………………………………………………...2/3
3.0 Analysing Market