Through an ever-increasing connectivity, the digital imprints left behind are opening new possibilities for organizations. Big data contains large amounts of consumer data and through analysis this data is transformed into information. This has enabled organizations new forms of how to implement big data to the decision-making process regarding segmentation of consumers. Through a qualitative survey and semi-structured interviews, a case study is used for the research of Destination Gotland and TUI. The purpose of this study is to investigate how big data affects the decision-making process for segmentation at two organizations in the travel industry. The theoretical framework has been designed after thorough research of relevant literature. The Analysis model used in the thesis is a product of the theoretical framework. The results of this study show that big data is affecting how organizations are identifying customer segments. Big data is used a foundation for decision-making but still relies on knowledgeable decision-makers. The type of market the organization is operating in is crucial to the nature decision that can be made regarding segmentation. / Till följd av den digitala utvecklingen har organisationer börjat inhämta och lagra stora mängder digital data. Den digitala datan som samlats in av organisationer benämns som big data och utgörs av personlig information om individer. En grundläggande del vid ett tillämpande av big data i organisationers arbete är en analys av insamlad information. Med hjälp av en analys transformeras datan till förståelig information som sedan kan appliceras i beslutsfattandeprocesser inom organisationer. Beslutsfattare inom organisationer använder information som är utvunnen från big data för att stärka deras argument vid situationer där beslut ska fattas. Big data har utvecklat och möjliggjort nya former av hur organisationer genomför beslutsfattandeprocessen gällande segmentering av konsumenter. Med avseende på det bredare utbud av information som finns tillgänglig om individer tilltar organisationers möjligheter för en ökad förståelse om individen. Informationen som samlas in av organisationer kan ha både dagsaktuell och historisk karaktär. Syftet med uppsatsen är att med hjälp av en undersökning granska två svenska reseföretags användande av big data i deras beslutsfattade vid identifiering av nya segment. Studien utgår från en fallstudiedesign som undersöker två svenska företag inom resebranschen med hjälp av kvalitativa intervjuer. Det teoretiska ramverk uppsatsen bygger på har utformats utefter problemformuleringen och tar därför upp big data, beslutsfattande och segmentering. Detta leder fram till en analysmodell som förklarar hur dessa begrepp förhåller sig till varandra. De resultat undersökningen påvisar är att organisationers identifiering av nya kundsegment påverkas av big data på olika sätt. Big data används som underlag för beslut men är fortfarande i behov av kompetenta beslutsfattare med sakkunskap om marknaden och konsumenter. Beroende på vilken marknad organisationen är verksam på är typen av data avgörande för vilka beslut gällande identifiering av segment som kan fattas.

Syfte och forskningsfrågor Studiens avsikt är att undersöka hur reseindustrin har påverkats av digitaliseringen genom att studera svenska reseaktörers marknadsföringsstrategier, anpassning till digitaliseringen samt syn på deras framtida roll. Utifrån studiens syfte kommer följande forskningsfrågor att besvaras: Hur marknadsför svenska reseaktörer sig idag? Vilka fördelar och nackdelar ser svenska reseaktörer med digitaliseringen inom reseindustrin? Hur ser svenska reseaktörer på sin framtida roll? Metod Studien är baserad på en kvalitativ undersökning, det empiriska materialet är insamlad genom semistrukturerade intervjuer som har genomförts med fem verksamma reseaktörer i Sverige. Slutsatser Studiens resultat visar på att reseaktörer i Sverige investerar i digital marknadsföring samt verktyg för att bygga upp varumärke, tillit och interaktion med kunder. Information samt kommunikation till kunder har underlättats genom digitaliseringen, att kommunicera ut personlig service, tillit och fånga in kunder har försvårats.  Reseaktörer har förändrat sin roll både i den fysiska och digitala marknaden efter kunders behov. / Purpose and research questions The purpose of the study is to investigate how the travel industry has been affected by digitization by studying travel operators marketing strategies, adaptation and views on their future role. In order to fulfil this purpose, the following questions have been formulated: How are travel operators in Sweden marketing themselves today? What are the advantages and disadvantages for travel operators in Sweden with relevance to the digitalization processes? What are travel operators in Sweden thinking about their future role in the tourism industry? Method The method included qualitative methods. Five semi structured interviews have been conducted with five travel operators in Sweden. Conclusions The results indicate that travel operators in Sweden invest in digital marketing for brand building, achieving customer loyalty and personal interaction. This study shows that facilitation of information and interaction with customers as advantages and communicating personal service, trust and targeting customers as difficulties. Travel operators have changed their role according to customer needs.

In this thesis, we analyze the impact of the decentralization of price and leadtime decisions made by the marketing and production departments, respectively, in a make-to-order firm. We first study a monopoly environment, and find that in the decentralized setting, the total demand generated is larger, leadtimes are longer, quoted prices are lower, and the firm profits are lower as compared to the centralized setting. We show that coordination can be achieved using a transfer price contract with bonus payments, where both departments receive a fraction of the total revenues generated as a bonus payment. In the second study, we extend this work to a duopoly environment, where two firms compete on the basis of their price and leadtime quotes in a common market. We find that under intense price competition, firms may suffer from a decentralized structure, particularly under high flexibility induced by high capacity, where revenue based sales incentives motivate sales/marketing for more aggressive price cuts resulting in eroding margins. We take the parameters of the demand models in the first two studies as constant, while estimating those parameters based on historical data is a very important problem in practice. In the last study of this thesis, we address the challenges encountered in estimating the price sensitivity of customers shifting focus to the passenger travel industry. We explore how to obtain better price elasticity estimates through an empirical study with an emphasis on the endogeneity problem, which arises as a result of the simultaneous determination of supply and demand. We show that if one does not account for endogeneity, price elasticities may induce an upward-sloping demand curve suggesting that high price produces high demand, or may be biased downward to the extent that elastic demand curves are incorrectly classified as inelastic. We show the improvement in price elasticities through an instrumental variable approach.

Operation scales of the travel agencies can be giant or tiny in term of sizes. No matter in Taiwan or abroad, most trvel agents are SMEs (small and medium enterprises), while some large-scale foreign or mainland travel agencies are even bigger than ordinary banks or airlines. Travel agents play a role as an important channel for travelers. They collect a considerable huge amount of money from travelers and pay to the suppliers just like a temporary God of Wealth. Airline tickets and tour fares end up to some hundred millions or even some billions of turn over (in total amount counting method) commonly. This is an industry which charges in advance before providing services. In addition to the shorter term of airline credit, six elements of travel - meals, accommodations, transportations, sightseeing, shopping, and entertainments, are allowed routinely credited periodically, especially tours fares often accumulated to an astronomical figures. This sevice industry is quite different from other manufacture suffered from the "inventories" problem, but with something in common, it has a huge amount of outstanding accounts remain unsettled, or even worse to cause the phoenomenon of financial black hole with "assets virtually inflated and liabilities virtually reduced". Several large tours wholesalers in Taiwan went bankruptcy might be owing to these reasons. Even the subsidiary of TUI, the world's largest tours group, outbroke similar news incident in early 2011. It was not singly but in pairs, Reuters reported that Europe's second largest travel company Thomas Cook facing financial crisis in late 2011, were forced to acquire ¢G 2 billion loan from banks to survive in the coming low winter season. A great amount of accumulated money often causes a crisis of credit expansion, if any ambitious entrepreneur seeks to gain more profits from other reinvestments, intends to get real estates, accquitions, mergers, and other risky investments, possibly resulted in large scale damage with both investments and foreign currency exchange losses, when facing an economy downturn or political turmoils. "Financial management" is always the primary course of business running. Emphasis on the "financial problems management" is not just a slogon, and not just to watch bank deposits closely, but also to realize how and what sholuld be seriously paid attention to. Revenue increasing and cost cutting are always the true value of financial management on business development. The differences of corporate finance from time to time are as same as different figures of human pulse, blood presure, or blood suguar that varies at diffent times or in different conditions. Financial management of a company is just like personal health management, such as people in different stages faces different situations and needs. So companies must grasp the pulse of business development in different stages to plan for the future direction. Many companies seek to maximize profits at the same time, yet ignoring the strong managing and decision-guiding functions of financial management. Newspapers and magazines often report how many employees and consumers are impacted by the closing of plants or travel agencies, many of them are wellknown enterprises. Although the global economic downturns, the failure of business diversification or reinvestment hold-up losses and other factors might take the blames. But as the old saying: "There is no sunset industry but only sunset enterprises." How to survive in the harsh environment? We must strengthen to master financial management, through analysis and control of "financial problems management" to generate necessary resources and to cut the costs to enhance the business performance. "The management of financial problems among travel industry" is really the weakest point of this industry. Practical financial management books or informations for travel agencies are not easy to be found in stores or other resources. In past decades we have seen the rotation of rises and falls in the industry, we strongly believe "Accounting and Financial Management" is the basis for all kinds of management. This thesis contains the examples of Phoenix Tours International and other travel agents among Taiwan travel industry. The real experiences of daily practices are the most important contents. I attempt to integrate academic theories into daily practices, a little theoretical but more practical argument, to provide better healthy informations for the industry. Despite the company accounting system, I had also tried to establish a basic financial training material for my management team. Wish all our colleagues will not repeat the same financial errors of their predecessors. Under the guideline of Taiwan Tourism Bureau which is committed to developing tourism with ¡§Vanguard for excellences and piloting for all projects¡¨, I tried to do my best to write down personal experiences and researches knowledge as basic works. Hope to bring up some echoes and brainstormings, to lead a brighter future and better progress for the industry. All the appendixes to this thesis are important references to the main text. Many of them are also my writings in the past. At last, IFRSs regulations will soon be implemented, we have to find out its impacts on the enterprises that should not be underestimated. Not only affect financial and accounting areas, information system, performance reward systems, investor relations, tax and legal aspects will also have significant impacts. IFRSs conversion or convergence may not only be an easy task, but provides an excellent opportunity for companies to re-examine the existing financial strategies, accounting policies, management systems, process efficiencies, risk managements, internal controls, system functions, corporate governances and investor relations practices, such as whether to meet current and future needs, and take this opportunity to enhance their strengths by improving inadequacies.

Submitted by Camila dos Anjos Ferraz (cacaferraz@gmail.com) on 2015-12-25T19:05:12Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Co-Creation in Hospitality Industry - a Case Study on the Drivers for Traveler-Generated Content.pdf: 2832811 bytes, checksum: de014292f47037eecdbc94c6ac2ec326 (MD5) / Rejected by Ana Luiza Holme (ana.holme@fgv.br), reason: Camila, O numero das paginas só pode aparecer a partir da introdução. Aguardo. Ana Luiza Holme 3799-3492 on 2016-01-04T11:14:13Z (GMT) / Submitted by Camila dos Anjos Ferraz (cacaferraz@gmail.com) on 2016-01-05T21:22:34Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Co-Creation in Hospitality Industry - a Case Study on the Drivers for Traveler-Generated Content.pdf: 2835215 bytes, checksum: 46c4a7a25788c28545d6f2e54f44fae6 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Ana Luiza Holme (ana.holme@fgv.br) on 2016-01-06T11:12:17Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 Co-Creation in Hospitality Industry - a Case Study on the Drivers for Traveler-Generated Content.pdf: 2835215 bytes, checksum: 46c4a7a25788c28545d6f2e54f44fae6 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-01-06T11:44:26Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Co-Creation in Hospitality Industry - a Case Study on the Drivers for Traveler-Generated Content.pdf: 2835215 bytes, checksum: 46c4a7a25788c28545d6f2e54f44fae6 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015-12-18 / User-generated content in travel industry is the phenomenon studied in this research, which aims to fill the literature gap on the drivers to write reviews on TripAdvisor. The object of study is relevant from a managerial standpoint since the motivators that drive users to co-create can shape strategies and be turned into external leverages that generate value for brands through content production. From an academic perspective, the goal is to enhance literature on the field, and fill a gap on adherence of local culture to UGC given industry structure specificities. The business’ impact of UGC is supported by the fact that it increases e-commerce conversion rates since research undertaken by Ye, Law, Gu and Chen (2009) states each 10% in traveler review ratings boosts online booking in more than 5%. The literature review builds a theoretical framework on required concepts to support the TripAdvisor case study methodology. Quantitative and qualitative data compound the methodological approach through literature review, desk research, executive interview, and user survey which are analyzed under factor and cluster analysis to group users with similar drivers towards UGC. Additionally, cultural and country-specific aspects impact user behavior. Since hospitality industry in Brazil is concentrated on long tail – 92% of hotels in Brazil are independent ones (Jones Lang LaSalle, 2015, p. 7) – and lesser known hotels take better advantage of reviews – according to Luca (2011) each one Yelp-star increase in rating, increases in 9% independent restaurant revenue whereas in chain restaurants the reviews have no effect – , this dissertation sought to understand UGC in the context of travelers from São Paulo (Brazil) and adopted the case of TripAdvisor to describe what are the incentives that drives user’s co-creation among targeted travelers. It has an outcome of 4 different clusters with different drivers for UGC that enables to design marketing strategies, and it also concludes there’s a big potential to convert current content consumers into producers, the remaining importance of friends and family referrals and the role played by incentives. Among the conclusions, this study lead us to an exploration of positive feedback and network effect concepts, a reinforcement of the UGC relevance for long tail hotels, the interdependence across content production, consumption and participation; and the role played by technology allied with behavioral analysis to take effective decisions. The adherence of UGC to hospitality industry, also outlines the formulation of the concept present in the dissertation title of 'Traveler-Generated Content'. / Esta pesquisa estuda o fenômeno de conteúdo gerado por usuários aplicado à indústria de turismo com o objetivo de preencher a lacuna literária nas motivações que levam usuários à escrever avaliações no TripAdvisor. O objeto do estudo tem sua relevância gerencial uma vez que, identificadas as motivações dos viajantes para co-criar, estas possam tornar-se alavancas para geração de valor para marcas através da geração de conteúdo. Do ponto de vista acadêmico, o objetivo é expandir a literatura neste campo e endereçar a aderência de cultura local de co-criação aplicada às especifidades da indústria selecionada. O impacto de conteúdo gerado pelo usuário é endossado pelo fato das avaliações influenciarem as taxas de conversão. De acordo com a pesquisa conduzida por Ye, Law, Gu e Chen (2009), para cada 10% incremental na avaliação de um hotel, as reservas online crescem em 5%. A revisão literária constrói o modelo teórico para embasar a metodologia de estudo de caso do TripAdvisor. Aspectos quantitativos e qualitativos compõem a abordagem metodológica por meio de revisão literária, pesquisa por dados secundários, entrevista com executivo e pesquisa com usuários processadas com análises fatoriais e de agrupamentos (clusters). Além disso, o comportamento do usuário é impactado por aspectos culturais, o que diferencia suas motivações. A indústria de hospitalidade no Brasil é predominantemente dispersa sendo 92% dos quartos de hotéis independentes (Jones Lang LaSalle, 2015, p. 7) e hotéis menos conhecidos tendem a ser mais beneficiados em consideração do consumidor depois de receber avaliações segundo Luca (2011), que observou que o aumento de uma estrela na avaliação do Yelp, aumenta em 9% o faturamento de restaurantes independentes, enquanto nos de rede não há nenhum impacto. Portanto, essa dissertação almeja entender a geração de conteúdo por usuários no contexto de viajantes de São Paulo, Brasil, adotando o caso do TripAdvisor para descrever os incentivos para co-criação de usuários entre o público selecionado. A análise entrega quatro diferentes grupos que permitem embasar o desenvolvimento de estratégias de marketing. O estudo também sugere a existência de potencial na conversão de atuais consumidores de conteúdo em produtores de conteúdo, a remanescente importância das recomendações de familiares e amigos e o papel exercido por incentivos. Dentre as conclusões, a pesquisa leva à exploração dos conceitos de feedback positivo e efeito de rede, o reforço da relevância de conteúdo gerado por usuários para hotéis independentes, a interdependência entre participação, produção e consumo de conteúdo e o papel exercido pela tecnologia, aliada à análises comportamentais, na tomada de decisões. A aderência do conceito de UGC à indústria de hospitalidade nos leva ao conceito presente no título da dissertação de 'Conteúdo Gerado por Viajantes'.

This diploma thesis analyses technical heritage sites near the town of České Budějovice. The analysis also comprises an assessment of the current status of utilisation of these technical heritage sites in travel industry. A utilization plan of technical heritage sites as travel industry products was also formed on the basis of primary and secondary sources.

Staging experiences and providing optimal customer experience has become the new battlefield within the marketing segment, since the introduction of experience economy. The modern customer has multiple devices, channels and touchpoints to interact with the organization and with rapidly changing digital technology, where the product or service information are available online 24/7, he/ she is in-charge of his/ her own experiences. This multitude of options pose great challenges for the organization to understand customer needs, expectations, and behavior, and predict and manage customer experience. Despite numerous studies and streams of literature, several authors, scholars, and practitioners have developed fragmented frameworks and models that partially addresses this multidimensional construct of customer experience. Furthermore, things get complicated when these fragmented constructs are used by the luxury travel industry to design, develop, and manage customer experience. Therefore, in order to address this broad concept and provide the organization with a holistic framework that can be leveraged for providing customer experience, we conducted a qualitative multi-case study, that included 14 semi-structured interviews from various actors within the supply- chain of the luxury travel industry. Using thematic analysis, the rich empirical data from the interviews were analyzed and transformed into sub-themes and themes. Keeping these themes as the foundation, we propose an integrated conceptual model that captures a firm integrating customer and co-creation perspectives to provide customer experience. This integrated model consists of five building blocks, Organizational Factors, Design, Delivery and Management of customer experience, Co-Creation, Customer Experience Insights / Metrics and Moderating Factors, that coupled together should influence customer experience. Using this conceptual model, we analyzed how different actors within the supply-chain provide customer experience. Subsequently, we also develop a customer journey map (from a customer perspective) consisting of customer needs, channels, and touchpoints to understand the critical touchpoint that act as the primary contributors for providing customer experience. And finally, we highlight the driving factors and barriers for providing customer experience within luxury travel industry.

The Master's thesis focuses on the phenomenon of travel from the perspective of Czechoslovak citizens who travelled to destinations offered by travel agencies, trade unions or their employers from the 1970s to 17th November 1989. The time span is defined by the memory of the living narrators, who can refer to their travel in adulthood. The economic and social situation is addressed in the first part of the thesis, followed by issues related to tourism. The main part consists of interpretation of biographical narratives focused on the phenomenon of travel. Synthesis of biographical exploration and acquired data can result in a personal as well as historic view of the travel phenomenon within the defined time span. Findings about travelling and travel industry are summarized at the end of this master's thesis with regard to the present. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

The aim of this diploma thesis is to analyze a buyer decision process of consumers in travel industry with a focus on outgoing tourism. The diploma thesis is divided in six parts. The first part focuses on theory of consumer behavior followed by marketing of services with an emphasis on tourism. Next part covers buyer decision process of consumers in travel industry based on results from analysis of a questionnaire. These results are integrated with agency data. A summary of acquired results is compared to all phases of buyer decision process at the end of this thesis.