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Marketing in the Travel and

Tourism Industry
BTEC Travel and Tourism

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Definition
• Marketing is about anticipating and
identifying the wants and needs of a
target market of consumers, then
satisfying those needs in order to make
a profit
• Firstly, travel and tourism organisations
must understand their customers’
demands. This is the ‘anticipating’ and
‘identifying’ part of the definition

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Marketing Research
• Anticipating and identifying
demands depends on effective
marketing research
• Research into the existing and
potential market
• We will look into this in detail in
the Activity

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Marketing Research
• Classifying customers according to
socio-economic status, lifestyle, family
circumstances, gender and so on
• May involve primary research –
surveys, observation, questionnaires
• And/or secondary research – statistics
and records, quantitative and
qualitative

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Classifying Customers
• A target market consists of a whole
group of potential customers, drawn
from the whole population
• It’s better to define the target market
as a collection of ‘segments’
• Each segment will have different
characteristics
• Each segment’s needs and wants must
be satisfied

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Market Segmentation
• In the domestic tourism market the
following segments may be involved:
• VFR (look for a definition of this term
during the Activity)
• General business tourism
• Holidays and breaks pre-family
• Long holidays
• Activity holidays
• Group holidays

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Marketing Mix
• The way in which current and potential
customers’ demands are satisfied
depends on the marketing mix of the
organisation’s products and services:
• Traditionally 4 elements of the mix –
Product, Price, Promotion and Place
• In the modern travel and tourism
industry it’s usual to look at 6

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Elements of the Marketing Mix

Product or service
• Quality
• Value
• Lifecycle
• Perishability
• Differentiation
• Niche

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Elements of the Marketing Mix

Price
• Seasonality
• Strategies
• Competitor analysis
• Loss leadership
• Skimming

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Elements of the Marketing Mix

Promotion
• Advertising
• Endorsements
• Sponsorship
• Methods – use of different media,
brochures/leaflets, public relations,
sales promotion, press releases
• To gain attention/interest/desire/action

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Elements of the Marketing Mix

Place
• Channels of distribution
• Getting tourism services to customers
• Retail services such as travel agents
• Direct marketing through targeted mail
outs
• Electronic methods, such as using the
Internet
• The growth of technology

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Elements of the Marketing Mix

People
• Employees
• Management
• Culture of organisation
• Attitude to customer service

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Elements of the Marketing Mix

Planning
• Mission statements
• Deciding on objectives
• ‘What are we trying to achieve?’ –
profit, cut the competition, boost
share of market, enter new
markets and so on

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