Blog Entry 5a

Evaluation the impact of the internet and digital technologies on the marketing mix element – Travel Industry case

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The one of largest service industries in the world is travels industry. Travel industry is different with tourism industry. Travel industry is a service that providing services related to travel from one location to another including hotels, airplanes while tourism is about act of travelling to a different location, either for business or pleasure (https://www.revfine.com/travel-industry/#what-is-the-travel-industry)

What’s the impact of the internet and digital technologies on the marketing mix element?

In this blog I would like to discuss about the impact. In 1960, marketing mix is referred as 4PS consist of Price, Place, Product and Promotion and purposes by Jerome McCarthy (Chaffey&Ellis , 2019). But in 1980s, the marketing mix extended to the 7PS and the additional is people, process and physical evidence (Chaffey&Ellis , 2019. p.191). In my opinion, there are many evaluations the impact of the internet and digital technologies in the travel industry and dealt with below.

• Product

According to Chaffey and Ellis, the industry could offer the core product, digital product, extend product, and create the branding (Chaffey&Ellis, 2019, p.193). The good example of this is Flight Centre website. The digital technologies help the customer to made the booking for their traveling without come to the offline store. This action probably helps the industry as well to offer many services just in one website. In one website, customer could get many information about the services that industry offers to the customer, and of course this action makes the industry easier and save a lot of time to introducing their product

• Price

Digital technologies and internet help this section to price transparency, pricing level, innovative pricing, and alternative pricing (Chaffey & Ellis, 2019, p.204). Customer will knowledge all of the price from Travel industry by Internet and technologies. Currently, there are the apps name Skyscanner.com . This technology helps the customer to find the best price of airlines, hire car and hotel in several times.. The industry could use this application to find their competitor’s price and could know about the averages market price.

• Place

This segment talked about place of purchase the product itself (Chaffey & Ellis, 2019, p.213). The travel industry is a A – Seller Controlled which mean home site of organization selling product or services. In this segment, digital technologies and internet help the Travel Industry to has channel such as Website, Application to meet the needs of the customer. In this century, people tend to use their mobile phone than going to the offline store, so digital technologies and internet really help the Travel industry.

• Promotion

Digital technologies and internet would be really help and become the main source of travel industry to do the promotion in the online and could reach a lot of customer without worrying place and time. According to the Chaffey & Ellis (2019, p.220), there are the main elements in promotional mix. It is clearly to see, that those elements will help the travel industry to promote their product. Search Engine Optimization is a one of product from Internet could help the travel industry to do the promotion in Internet and Digital technologies.  

• People, process and physical evidence

Last but not least is 3 additional P of marketing mix. These 3 factors are talking about the service mix in the marketing e.g. individuals in the marketing activities, customer focus, sales ‘staff contact experiences and online experience. Travel industry could consider this 3P to optimizing their online services. In my opinion, the easy user interface of their website could give the best online experiences for customer. Some of website from travel agency and airlines has a same function and format but the simple user interface could made the organization stand out than their competitor.

So, this is the end of my evaluation! How about you guys? Do you have any favor or opinion to this industry? Share with me your experiences! Xoxo, El.

References:

Chaffey, D., & Ellis-Chadwick, F. (2019). Digital marketing. Retrieved from https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.ezproxy.canberra.edu.au