Posts Tagged "tourism management"

By tjolley on Jul 7, 2009 in Tonyversity View | 0 comments

Travelmole.com reports today (7th July ’09) that a company called ‘The Holiday Team’ is calling for far more co-operation in the teeth of this crisis in which company budgets are under such pressure (because, as we all know, the fastest way to produce a profit is to cut costs): “At a time when agents are reviewing costs on every level suppliers to the travel trade need to be innovative and offer something extra to help agents increase their profit in difficult times. Now is the time for businesses with shared commercial interests to work together to develop plans which will help to boost sales. This week we launched a commitment to our travel agency partners to assist them with marketing advice and support. And on a selective basis we’ll even offer a financial package to help with marketing.” Although glad that this sort of approach is finding greater favour nowadays, it is somewhat galling that it hadn’t ‘caught on’ in the industry far earlier as there have been no end of good examples and templates. For donkeys’ years we have been stuck on a roundabout (or ‘in a rut’, as you prefer) of cut-throat, dog-eat-dog competition where the thought of co-operation or ‘co-opetition’ is anathema. We are belatedly realising in this crisis that there are other avenues open to us, largely because we are discovering how wasteful all-out competition can be and that we have little alternative but to cooperate at some level because the budgets are no longer there at the level of the individual business. Good to see this cooperative approach stimulated, in this example, by the private sector, because, in fact, (and perhaps somewhat surprisingly), the public sector has, for some considerable time, been leading the way in developing Tourism partnerships and cooperative ventures and offering opportunity for the private sector tourism industry to get involved.  Take the Dorset and New Forest Tourism Partnership, for example: a visionary partnership initiated by all the local authorities of the region with the intermediary assistance of Bournemouth University and other NGO partners providing considerable ‘seedcorn’ monies up front over a period of years now, then securing EU matched funding to generate a considerable range of opportunities for the Tourism...