Food and beverage industry is facing continued evolution because of the forces in the global market. Customer preferences are changing and government increasing regulations in this industry (Bernard, Andrew & Sally 2008, p234). Also competition is very stiff and in order to survive one should offer wide selection of products to meet the needs of the customer and at the same time concentrate on producing high quality products. Tourism is an important industry in food and beverage area and it covers recreational activities, business and leisure.
Countries earn large amount of money from these activities which results to job creation in service industries which are related to tourism like airlines, transportation services, entertainment, and hospitality services among others. Tourism can be classified as outbound industry for those people traveling in other countries, domestic tourism for those traveling within their country and inbound tourism for non citizens traveling in a certain country. Tourism market faces certain problems which make the revenue earned to decrease in stead of increasing (PNV Nair 2010).
Changing patterns in tourism markets is one of the challenges that the tourism industry is facing. The demands for customized holidays have increased and thus tourism industries have the challenge of adopting high information technology to make this customization possible. Great increase in demand for non hotel accommodations is another trend that tourists are adopting. Due to people having few working hours and rise in the number of days of paid leaves it has resulted to fragmentation of holidays.
The other tourism trend is that demand segmentation has been made more complicated by doing away with the traditional activities for example people are going for honeymoon in destination which they can access cultural products, theme cruise and sun and sand.
Holidays have also shifted from being active to experienced holidays. This helps the tourist get an experience which is complete and participative and provides authentic emotions as well as new knowledge. Unlike in the past where tourists were going for long stays the trend is changing to short stays.
The other change that has affected the tourism market is the economic problems. Many countries experience the problem of attracting many tourists during recession times. During economic crisis the number of tourists traveling decreases, which result to hotel companies, airlines and holiday companies to lose clients earn less revenue and even some of these companies going bankrupt (PNV Nair 2010). Economic crisis has resulted to high rate of inflation which has resulted to the services and products offered by this industry to be very expensive thus discouraging the tourism activity.
Competition has also affected the tourism industry where every company is coming up with different products and services to attract customers. Different tourism destination have come up which has resulted to stiff competition in the tourism market. For company to survive in such competitive environment it must come up with ways of surviving in the market. Product development strategy In order to overcome these problems, marketing strategies should be formulated. The first strategy is to develop products and services that will meet the customers’ expectations.
This will help in attracting tourists and customers who will spend a lot. Product development in tourism involves systematically looking at the offerings, regions, niches and market in order to determine the right businesses in tourism, the products and markets to develop, that is those that have potential in order to prosper economically and also provide a good offer and experience. This strategy helps one to identify the bad development, those products that will fail and those that have bad impact to the environment in terms of degrading the area.
Product development strategy involves developing products related to tourism concentrating on providing quality and industry involvement in order to get full economic benefits. Products developed should meet the expectations of the tourists. It also involves improvement of the quality of the already existing tourism accommodation facilities or product for the tourist to have a wide selection of accommodation facilities which are of high quality to choose from. It also involves creation of niche markets in order to attract more tourists in the area.
Product development strategy helps in the methods in which development of business, marketing and marketing are used in product development have a good impact. Some of the tourism products that should be developed include museums, holidays, events, nature reserves, short breaks, local food and art galleries among others (Alan & Brian 2005 219). Product development process has five steps, the first being product development proposal which aims at analyzing any proposal to know if the suggested ideas have the ability f becoming a winner in developing proposal for tourism product.
The product proposal should contain detail on the emergence of idea, show how that idea is related to existing research and give examples of other product ideas in the region. The proposal should also have project definition which gives information on target markets and a swot analysis for the idea. The next process is feasibility studies which aim at evaluating the idea keenly in order to know whether it is possible to continue developing the product or a different idea is needed.
Two stages are invoved where the first is taking the product through a feasibility study which covers competitor analysis, potential values and market size, evidence of the segments that will be attracted by the product and time that the product will take to develop. The other stage in feasibility study is designing of the product and further testing (Edward 2000 p448). If the feasibility study shows positive potential then designing and further testing of the product should be done.
Partners and stakeholders are involved to help in development of this product because there is already enough evidence. The third step is product development which has three elements. The first element is business case which justifies the project. It covers areas like marketing and publicity and information that justify that the project will sustain itself. The other element in product development stage is project plan which identifies when the development will be done, who will do it and how it will be done.
It shows the timetable of the project and information on how everything will be put together and managed in order develop the product within the budget set and on time. The third element in product development process is planning the project and it covers all the activities required to get the product off the ground. It also covers issues like definition of tasks, required training, and management of changes, quality plan and monitoring. The forth process in development of product is launching.
This involves taking the product to the market and attracting the attention of potential customers. A soft launch can be done where the business will begin trading with an aim of testing the service or product, gain feedbacks from customers and deal with failures. Then a hard launch can be done aimed at launching the product to the large market. A launching event can be done inviting the pioneers, tourism business and professionals, local radio and television and even the press to cover the event.
The last step in product development process is evaluation which should be a continuous process. Evaluation involves monitoring and should show the market share estimated, sales of the tourism product launched, the product development impacts, marketing plan and operational and financial performance. It should also cover quality control, evaluation of whether there are other business opportunities of the new tourism product developed and monitoring the customer satisfaction, costumer care and service
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