Marketing strategy development in travel agents: A research on marketing strategies of travel agents operated in İstanbul

The changing environment and development in information technologies brought in a global dimension to competition. The changing environment and global competition affect the success of marketing activities of travel agents and sustainability of their business. So developing and implementing right marketing strategies become very essential for travel agent managers. Travel agents are one of the main intermediaries in tourism industry. In fact, they create link between destinations, tourism service providers and the tourists. It is accepted that marketing strategy has three dimensions (Kotler 2003: 69). First, one is determining target markets. The second is creating marketing mix that will satisfy needs and wants of the customers and the third one is allocating marketing budget among the marketing mix. The purpose of this thesis is to examine marketing strategy development activities of travel agents. For this purpose an empirical research was conducted on travel agents operating in Istanbul in the March 2007, and 170 travel agents had responded to the survey. Data were collected via questionnaire and convenience sampling method was used. The findings indicate that nearly 30 percent of agents seem to not having a marketing/sales department. On the other hand, in the 60 percents of agents, customers are not grouped according to any variable. Also another remarkable finding is that frequency rates of possible marketing strategy development activities are low. The findings about marketing mix strategies in travel agents indicate that, the experience of managers and results of marketing researches are taken into consideration highly while the service is being developed. It was found that 61 percent of agents prefer indirect distribution strategy where as 39 percent prefer direct distribution. In terms of promotion, personal selling is very effective and promotional activities are hold by employee of travel agent. On the other hand, quality and costs of services play critical role in pricing of service, however in price differentiation, price of service providers? plays critical role. The study ends with some suggestions for travel agents? managers.