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.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:NSYSU/oai:NSYSU:etd-0626112-183742 |
| Date | 26 June 2012 |
| Creators | Chang, King-Ming |
| Contributors | Jen-Jsung Huang, Pei-how Huang, Chi-Cheng Wu |
| Publisher | NSYSU |
| Source Sets | NSYSU Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Archive |
| Language | Cholon |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.lib.nsysu.edu.tw/ETD-db/ETD-search/view_etd?URN=etd-0626112-183742 |
| Rights | unrestricted, Copyright information available at source archive |
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