My Travel Marketing Strategy

Introduction

There are many elements to developing a marketing strategy. However, each element of a marketing strategy should in essence add customer value to the products or services being offered. Indeed the main purpose of marketing management is to bridge the gap between the multiple divisions of an organization and the internal and external business environment. The marketing management is accountable for various activities such as product development, promotion, pricing and distribution decisions, as well as market segmentation and marketing research (Briggs, 2001).

The complexity in developing a marketing strategy is no less evident than in the tourism industry, one of the most highly competitive industries in the world. In the UK, holiday-makers take some 36 million overseas holidays each year. Of these, almost half are "packaged holidays" - where the consumer buys a complete package of accommodation, flight and other extras - all bundled into one price. This is a highly competitive market with a small number of large tour operators (including MyTravel, Thomson Holidays, First Choice, JMC) all competing hard for market share (Business Casebook, 2004). Effective tourism marketing will create competitive advantage for the tour operator by ensuring that their delivery is superior to their competitors (Jefferson and Lickorish, 1991).

This report focuses open the multiple factors that a marketing strategy of a company must encompass in order to provide maximum potential value to the customer. To illustrate the importance of these factors, the report will utilize the tour operator MyTravel to provide examples of why each of these strategic factors plays an important role. At the same time the structure of the report will be based upon Nigel Piercy's concept that marketing strategy processes fall into either defining, developing or delivering customer (Piercy, 2002).

Company Profile - MyTravel

In November 2001, global tour operator Airtours launched MyTravel, an e-commerce initiative under which it would link several tour operators, with their brochures, call centres, high street shops and new media sales channels under one travel provider. The MyTravel channel, covers consumers in the UK, Scandinavia, Germany and the US. The major problem then was to establish a marketing strategy for MyTravel that could account for all the many elements not only selling holidays but accommodating the separate divisions of the group (MyTravel, 2006).

Defining-Customer Value

1. Marketing Information

Even before any marketing strategy can be devised