Travel industry is one of three main industries, linking tourists with their resources and facilities, and it has a great part in the tourism industry with accommodation. However, there are few who are interested in this field compared with other fiel...
Travel industry is one of three main industries, linking tourists with their resources and facilities, and it has a great part in the tourism industry with accommodation. However, there are few who are interested in this field compared with other fields.
The travel industry here in Korea firstly is made a challenge by other advanced countries in an effort to open our service market historical turning point in our travel industry. Secondly, the travel industry today is transformed to emphasize its social responsibility and to play its roles as planning and producing goods instead of a simple function of intermediation in the past. And finally, expectations of the travel industry and its economic roles have been increasing, and at the same time competitive spirits among travel agencies are also growing. As a result, researches in this field have been studying, rocognizing an importance of marketing environmental changes.
As marketing activities in modern enterprises are always in the market, it is very important to get useful information about it. Among them it is a preconsideration to understand what kind of motives and images the last consumer (tourist) will purchase goods and services.
To this end, all the businesses should develop their concrete marketing strategies through analysis of the customer's actitvies, competitors, and strength and weakness of inside or outside of the business. But to study the customer's activities is the most important one among them.
The tourists lay psychological factors as employees, atmosphere of a travel agency, the contact process between a customer and a agency besides functional factors as kind of goods, substances and prices up in their minds as an image of the agency. Thus, the image is an important variable by human being's behavior, and this kind of viewpoint is generally accepted in the markering.
Why this kind of viewpoint is important in the marketing is that the image has a strong energy to cause customer's interests. Especially for the travel, an intangible goods that functions as a psychological factor, such phenomenon is notable. The travel agency should try to reconsider its image-marketing for the tourists because the image exercises an important effect upon selling, so it is a very important marketing goal of the travel agency itself.
Existing studies on the enterprises's image are mostly how distinguish relative differences between businesses. The images by these studies could show only the sampled enterprise's ranks, but they could not find out what factors exercised an important effect upon an image-making. In this study, thus, try to grasp what kinds of the markting mix factor exert a great influence upon an image of the travel agency, based on the marketing mix factors among variables which can have an effect upon an image-marketing of the travel agency.
To this end, definite purposes of the study are as follows: Firstly, a theoretical framework for the marketing of traveling business that is not yet systematized in learning should be suggested and provided useful materials to develop the maketing of strategies. Secondly, the marketing mix factors of the travel agency that have an effect upon an image-marketing should be examined closely. And finally, how these marketing mix factors have an effect upon an image of the travel agency, and what kinds of the marketing strategies should be suggested in order to enhance an image of the travel agency by the customers.
By reviewing previous literatures of image models and decisive factors of the tourist agency, it came out that location of the travel agency, its selling products, employees, office atmosphere, selling price and its adaetivities were affected to its image-building, and at the same time its image could exert an absolute influence upon the choice of the travel agency, that meant its marketing mix factors. Generally speaking. Product, Price, Place and Promotion are the maketing mix factors, but besides these 3Ps. People, Physical Evidence and Process have an important effect upon marketing results in the tourist industry.
As a whole, the tourist industry is one of service businesses and the 3Ps including the 4Ps are factors to have a great influence upon the image-building of the travel agency. And among lower components of each mix, selected applicable factors to the tourist industry, set up the study model as shown in Figure 1 and three main and sixteen subordinate hypotheses in order to verify the study model mentioned above as follows: