HTT250 - TOUR PLANNING AND DESIGN

Let's discuss these questions:

 

PART A

 Answer ALL questions.

Fill in the blanks with appropriate answers.

1.  An advertising support in the form of monetary, which is provided by suppliers to the tour operator, is called Co-op Money.

2.  A fixed cost is a cost that never changes, regardless of the number of people on the tour.

 

3.  A publicity is promotional information that is disseminated at no cost to the tour company.

 

4.  A tour in which the destination and itinerary are kept secret to the client until he/she joins the tour Mystery Tour.

 

5. A compendium of facts about a company’s rules, regulations, and official procedures Tour Manual.

 

6.  Driving an empty bus back to its origin Deadheading.

 

7.  A concise, well-organized summary of what a person has to offer a potential employer Resume

 

8.  Preprinted brochures with photos, illustrations, and graphics but no text Shells.

 

9.  An itinerary in which part of the group does one thing while the other part does something else is called Split Itinerary.

  

10.  An estimation of passengers for a tour and budget a tour on a per-person basis is known as The Reasonable Number.

PART B

 

QUESTION 1

Define the following terms;

 

a)                  Immigration

The process by which a government official verifies a person’s passport, visa, or birth certificate

b)                  Pied piper

A member of a group, club, or other organization who helps promote a tour to the group, usually in return for a free trip

c)                  Reasonable number

An estimation of passengers for a tour and budget a tour on a per-person basis

d)                 Circle itinerary

An itinerary where the tour begins in a certain city, circles out to other destinations and returns to the original city

e)                  Open jaw

An itinerary in which passengers fly into one city and depart from a different one

 

QUESTION 2

 

What is the difference between fixed costs and variable costs? Explain and give an example of each cost.

Fixed Cost is cost that never changes, no matter how many people are on the tour. For example, a particular motorcoach may cost $500 a day, no matter if twenty people or forty people are on it.

Variable Cost is a cost that changes according to how many people take a tour. For instance, if it costs $10 per person to visit a castle, then the spending will be $200 for twenty people. But if a tour is made up of forty people, the expense will be $400.

    

 

QUESTION 3

 

Define the terms “supplier” and “attraction”. Give three specific examples of each.

Supplier is a company that provides services to tour operators. The three specific examples are:-

1.      Cruises such as Cruise Lines International Association.

2.      Rail Travel such as Orient Express.

3.      Dining and Tours such as Hard Rock Café

Attraction is the facilities, activities, locations, or sights that a tour visits, such as a monument, museum, or natural wonder. The three specific examples are:-

1.      Monument - Washington Monument

2.      Museum  - National Museum

3.      Natural Wonder - Victorial Falls

      

 

QUESTION 4

 

List any five (5) considerations that should be taken into account when designing a brochure?

Five (5) considerations that should be taken into account when designing a brochure are:

1.      Study the Brochures of Other Companies

Pick out the things you like. Avoid those you don’t. Make a list of the items (for instance, enrollment forms, terms, and conditions) that must be included.

2.      Follow the KISS Principle

In the advertising world, the KISS principle stand for “Keep It Simple, Stupid!” Potential clients reject cluttered, complicated brochures and flowery, poorly written pose. Edit out anything that is not absolutely necessary. When in doubt, throw it out.

3.      Give Your Brochure a Professional Look

Clients estimate the skillfulness of your tour operations based on the professionalism of your advertising. Creating a polished brochure has become relatively easy. Desktop publishing has drastically lowered the cost of producing fine-looking copy, and shells provide an inexpensive way to bring full-color gloss to your brochure.

4.      Make It Visual

Because of the impact of video on our daily lives, people today read less but look more. An all-prose, black-and-white, no-photo brochure looks dull in comparison to everything else in the market place. Older consumers do tolerate extended prose sections in promotional pieces, but even they are influenced by our increasingly visual society.

5.      What Prose You Do Use Should Be Visually Organized, Intimate, and to the Point

Examine some of the professional sales pieces you get in the mail. You’ll notice several common patterns. First, skilled writers today often use bullet points, numbers, short paragraphs, quick sentences, and plenty of blank white space to make the layout visually pleasing and easily digested. Second, they make frequent use of the words “you,” “us,” and “we,” as well as questions and imperative verbs, to link the reader with the seller in a very personal way. Third, they create what is called double path. Key words and phrases are underlined, italicized, or boldfaced. The permits a hurried reader to pay attention to only key concepts and still get the message. Readers with more time can still follow the traditional reading path and read every word.

 

 

QUESTION 5

 

Give ten (10) strategies for effective itinerary planning.

Ten (10) strategies for effective itinerary planning are:

1.      Determine What Your Intended Clients Want.

The ideal tour planner uses market research to fashion a tour in which all travel components match the customer’s needs, expectations, interests, budget, and energy level.

2.      Determine What Time of the Year Your Tours Should Ideally Depart

Are your clients factory workers who generally get the first two weeks of July off? Then you might offer budget-conscious packages to the Caribbean. (Summer is off-season in the Caribbean.) Or are your customers people who can vacation at any time of the year-retirees, for example-but who are budget conscious? (Budget travelers, in marketing terms, are “price-sensitive.”) A September departure to Acapulco or an October trip to St. Petersburg, Russia, may be attractive to this type of clientele, since rates to these destinations plummet during these low-season periods. Teachers and students travel during vacation periods while people from farming communities favor the winter. Few people take Christmas, Easter, or Yom Kippur. On the other hand, tours, especially shorter ones, sell uncommonly well around “non-family” holidays; in the United States, those times would be Labor Day, Memorial day, and the Fourth of July.

3.      Determine How Many Days Your Tour Should Run

Usually the itinerary determines how many days a particular tour will last. A tour of Washington, D.C., for example, justifies at least three but probably no more than six days. A Grand Tour of Europe, on the other hand, suggests a several-week-long itinerary, at least.

It’s not just what the destination suggests, though. It’s also what sells. Should that tour to Rio, for instance, be six, seven, or eight days long? Should it be nine days long and include side excursions to other attractions? An excellent clue to seleability when it comes to tour length is what tour companies have found to be successful and settled upon. Another factor that determines a tour’s length is its intended audience. Older, retired clients, for example, take longer, more expensive tours than do younger clients. 

4.      Choose the Appropriate Format for Your Itinerary

Itineraries come in three types. In a circle itinerary, the tour begins in a certain city, circles out to other destinations and returns to the original city. For example, tour members might fly to Paris, motorcoach to Brussels, Amsterdam, Cologne, and Reims (with stays in each city), and flies into Paris, travels to Brussels and Amsterdam (with stays in each city), and flies home from Cologne. (The air portion-flying into Paris and out of Cologne-would be called an “open-jaw” itinerary.)

In a hub-and-spoke itinerary, the group would fly into Paris (the “hub”) and stay there for the entire tour, taking day trips to nearby places (the “spokes”), but always returning back to Paris at the end of each day.

Each of these itinerary formats has its own strengths and weaknesses, based largely on the geography and economics of the destination.

5.      Choose Reliable and Well-Financed Suppliers

Ground operators go out of business with alarming regularity. Hotels can go downhill fast and airlines can go bankrupt. Make sure that the people you’re dealing with have sound track records. Imprudent supplier decisions – usually made to save money-can some back to mangle you’re your.

6.      Link Your Tour’s Title and Itinerary to Only One Concept

TWA Getaway Vacations, to cite an example, calls its tour of Italy “The Bellisimo” and its trip to several Italian, Spanish, and French cities “Mediterranean Magic.” Good tour titles are simple, evocative, and direct. You might want to call your tour the “Argentina, Brazil, and Peru Vacation,” but “South American Fiesta” will certainly conjure up far more intriguing and effective images in the buyer’s mind. Remember that a tour is an intangible. It can’t be seen or touched. It can be only experienced. Always strive to convey that experience in as exciting a way as possible.

Also, for some reason, travelers find it difficult to relate to an itinerary that visits more than one general area. For example, you might design a tour for Chicagoans that includes New York, Bermuda, and Paris (an easily arranged air route), but it probably won’t sell.

7.      Anchor the First and Last Days of Your Itinerary with Dramatic Destinations, Attractions, or Events

Starting your tour of California with a first-day ride on San Francisco’s cable cars and finishing it with a last-day visit to Disneyland or Universal Studios constitutes psychologically powerful tour planning. It probably wouldn’t work to begin it with a ride through Sonoma wine country and conclude it with a side excursion to Tijuana. Sonoma, though beautiful, won’t play to the group’s first-day energy. Tijuana will leave them with mixed feelings. Nothing influences a passenger’s overall perception of a tour more fully than the first and last days. Dramatic attractions on these days and perhaps a reception meal and/or farewell party will help ensure client satisfaction.

8.      Schedule Flights with Practical Client Considerations in Mind

Maybe an 8a.m. first-day airport departure seems reasonable to you, but how will it seem to those who must drive an hour to get there? Will they really like rising at 5a.m. to get ready? A connecting flight from point A to point B may cost less than a non-stop flight, but it might produce more delays, missed flights, lost luggage, and other headaches. Or could the connection be turned into an attractive stopover (for example, Hawaii on the way back home from Hong Kong)? Such pragmatic considerations are essential in arranging tours.

Consider, too, the jet-lag factor. After a long flight, scheduling should adjust for the client’s state of body and mind. Plan several interesting but untaxing activities for the arrival day (remember that the hotel may not have rooms ready for your group until later in the day) and get the group to bed early.

9.      Provide “Split” Itineraries for Groups that Warrant Them

A split itinerary is one in which part of the group does one thing while the other part does something else. It’s more appropriate for affinity groups. For example, on a golf tour, you might schedule some sightseeing, shopping, or other entertainment for the non-golfers while their companions are hitting the greens.

10.  Schedule as Few Hotel Changes as Possible

People hate packing and unpacking, and with good reason. You might want to schedule a group bound for, say, eastern Canada for two nights in Montreal, two in Quebec City, and two in Ottawa. It might work better to have them stay the entire time in Montreal and take day excursions to Ottawa and Quebec City. (Another example of the “hub and spoke” concept.) If you really wish to stay in several cities, fashion your itinerary in a logical manner. You might fly the group into Montreal, give them a day trip to Quebec City and continue on to Ottawa. Then either fly them out of Ottawa or continue on to Toronto and fly them home from there. (Both of these would be examples of one-way tour itineraries.) Limit the number of hotels you use through creative planning; avoid one-night stays whenever you can.