What are the problems of tourism standardization in China and what are the suggestions?

Standardization of product information in travel agencies Chapter 1: Industry background

The tourism industry is internationally recognized as the "everlasting sunrise industry", and it is an industry that provides travel and excursion services to tourists by virtue of the tourism resources and with the conditions of the tourism facilities, which is known as one of the world's three major industries.

The broad concept refers to the sector specializing in tourism business, but also includes all sectors related to tourism. The narrow concept refers to travel agencies, tourist hotels, tourist car and ship companies, as well as specializing in the sale of tourist commodities, tourism business and other industries. Overall view of the tourism industry, reform and opening up to the present development process is the world's attention, but more and more tourism disputes and complaints can show that the tourism industry in the development of the same time there are still many problems.

In these complaints, travel agencies accounted for 70%, hotels and scenic spots and other tourist industries accounted for 30%. It can be seen that the current situation of the travel agency industry has seriously constrained the development of tourism. Among the more prominent problems are:

First, "quality" and "quantity" out of tune. Recently, there have been a lot of problems such as security loopholes in scenic spots and travel agencies deceiving and ripping off customers, which have exposed the shadow behind the rapid development of the tourism industry. In contrast, hotels and restaurants are the development of branches of the way fast replication, travel agencies are contracted to rely on as a way to scale the development of the performance of even large and medium-sized brand-name travel agencies such as the China Travel Service and the China Travel Service is no exception.

This phenomenon is an important source of confusion in the market. Because operators can use the established travel agency brand to solicit business as long as they pay a certain amount of management fees, and these cottage travel agencies simply do not have a liability system, the emergence of tourism disputes outside the scope of competence, regardless of the completely muddy waters of the way of operation, indiscriminate line products and services.

Secondly, the low level of competitiveness of the travel agency industry has not been further enhanced with the development of tourism.

Thirdly, consumers' right to know is not guaranteed. The right to know refers to the right of consumers to know the truth about the goods they buy, use or services they receive. However, tourists do not have the relevant professional ability, so travel agencies often take advantage of the uncertainty of the text to add hidden negative information on the itinerary and travel contract provided.

The main reasons for the above phenomenon in the travel industry are as follows:

① Excessive competition. China's travel agencies operate a strong alternative products, the face of the market is narrow, although the state explicitly prohibited the practice of zero tour fee, but travel agencies in order to compete for the market, the implementation of vicious price competition, and then in the process of tourism activities to make up for the cost of non-normal means.

②The travel agency industry laws and regulations system is not sound, the government's regulatory tools are not perfect. The lack of law makes the travel agency industry as a whole lack of standardization, at the same time, some tourism administrative departments due to the lack of personnel lack of effective management. Taking Xi'an as an example, as a popular tourist city, there are a large number of groups and casual tourists conducting tourism activities in Xi'an and its surroundings every year. In this case, the proportion of scenic spots and other related management personnel is relatively small, too many management objects lead to the work can not be well done, there will be regulatory loopholes, such as tourism traffic and scenic reception capacity is too large, resulting in tourists stranded, and sometimes deteriorate into tourism disputes or tourist casualties.

③ Asymmetric information between travel agents and tourists about the travel agency's line products. The travel agency in the line product related to the promotion, often only with the text to the general description, resulting in the two sides in the understanding of the process of information asymmetry. The general situation is that tourists are at a disadvantage, and then in the tourism activities of the constraints everywhere, the travel agency will also take the opportunity to make gray profits.

④From the perspective of the tourists, the travel agency provides no standard line products, tourists have no proper reference when choosing, can not distinguish the good from the bad through comparison, so tourists will be conservative and choose the low-priced line products. This provides room for zero-negative-fare route products to survive.

Chapter 2: Standardization of Travel Agency Route Product Information

1. Overview of Travel Agency Route Products

Product refers to anything that can be offered to the market, used and consumed by people, and can satisfy people's needs of a certain kind, including tangible items, intangible services, organizations, ideas or a combination of them. Travel agency line products belong to the combination of intangible services.

Content-wise, tourism product refers to tourism attractions and services that tourism operators provide to tourists through the development and utilization of tourism resources. Here, tourism attraction refers to all kinds of things and factors in nature and human society that can produce attraction to tourists, such as Guilin landscape, Jingdezhen porcelain, ethnic minority festivals, etc., which is the object of tourism activities. And the travel agency line product refers to the tourism products provided by the travel agency.

From the objective relationship, the travel agency line product is included in the tourism product, is to maintain the travel agency and the relevant elements (tour guides, restaurants, hotels, transportation, scenic spots, shopping, etc.) of a medium. For example, in the product "Kunming Dali Lijiang Lugu Lake double flight pure play eight-day tour - 3500 yuan", "Kunming Dali Lijiang Lugu Lake" refers to the tourist destination and attractions, by the scenic area Provided to tourists; "double flight" refers to transportation, provided by the airline to tourists; "eight days" is the number of days, that is not the same day to return, there will be accommodation arrangements, three meals a day provided by the hotel to tourists, accommodation provided by the hotel to tourists; "pure play" is the number of days, that is not the same day to return, there will be accommodation arrangements, three meals a day provided by the hotel to tourists, accommodation provided by the hotel to tourists. "Pure play" that there is no shopping links, if any, by the Tourism Bureau designated tourist attractions to provide tourists, the last "3500 yuan", is the price of the line, by the travel agency and the tourists to complete directly, a party to provide products, a party to pay the money to consume, the two sides to confirm the The two sides can sign a travel contract after confirming.

Each part of the line product has a specialized service provider is responsible for providing, the travel agency will only collect the information in a certain order or method of arrangement and combination, and then sold to consumers with tourism needs. It can also be said that the travel agency is essentially just an information intermediary.

The classification of travel agency products is generally based on the proportion of the composition of the operating business is divided into a single product and the overall product. The single product refers to the commission and agency business, for example, for the self-driving tourists to provide guides or for the outbound visa agency, accounting for about 5% of the business volume. The biggest characteristic of this kind of business is that the amount of product information is small and it is difficult to make mistakes or misunderstandings. The overall product refers to the line products, such as "three-day tour of Beijing and Shanghai", transportation, accommodation, food, tour guides, etc. are arranged by the travel agency, accounting for about 95% of the business volume.

2. What is the travel agency line product information

"Information" is defined as: knowledge or news expressed in a form suitable for communication, storage or processing. It is a collection of things and phenomena and their attributes identification, is the increase of certainty. There are various types of information: natural information, biological information, social information. Travel agency route product information is the specific parameter arrangement and text description contained in the whole process of the route, such as tourist attractions, transportation facilities and related services, such as the departure time, the star rating of the hotel where you stay, the time you stay in the attractions and so on, it is a collection of social information.

In 1948, the American mathematician, the founder of information theory Shannon (Shannon) in the paper entitled "The mathematical theory of communication" pointed out that: "information is used to eliminate random uncertainty".

In conjunction with the line product, as long as the definition and analysis of the relevant information is correct, there will be no problem in tourism activities. But in reality, the human mind and understanding is too subjective, the abstract tourism activities into the concrete text information is very easy to slip up, the line product in the unqualified things can not be eliminated, for the travel agency's chaos to provide the breeding conditions.

3. How to standardize travel agency route product information

Travel agencies mainly use itineraries, printed materials and web pages as a way to deliver route product-related information to consumers. In the promotion process, some travel agencies, in order to avoid tourists' resentment, take the shopping point with only one sentence or write it similar to the attractions, so that tourists have a wrong impression. And the quality of description will be affected by the cultural level, experience and character of the staff. In addition, each travel agency has a lot of lines, and it is easy to make mistakes when manually handling a large number of words. Even the same staff may describe the route information differently for some reasons. If we want to avoid human inadequacy, we can only resort to electronic computers.

The use of computers will be the line product related resources for the most primitive information to be stored, organized and classified, so that in the future to retrieve part of the information combined into a travel agency products, just remember the number or search can quickly find the information needed. Add or modify the line, because the original classification framework has been stored, so only the specific project information for the corresponding rectification. The specificity of the computer ensures the completeness of the information and further guarantees the quality of the travel agency's itinerary product from which it is assembled. In this way, no matter how to promote in any way, there will be no catches in the promotion process.

After choosing the right tool, we can standardize the information contained in the route product in the form of a pharmaceutical manual. In the "chemical drugs and therapeutic biological products specification rules", the specific format and content of the instructions, including the name of the drug, structural formula and molecular formula (preparations should be accompanied by the main ingredients), usage and dosage (poisonous and dramatic drugs should have extreme amounts), approval number and other content. The following chart:

Let's take a look at some of the existing travel agency itineraries:

Example 1: The next day Lijiang - Kunming morning and midday Lodging: Kunming

After breakfast, we will go to the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain Scenic Spot, which is known as the "Switzerland of the Orient" (190 yuan, about 1.5 hours excluding queuing and on the ropeway time), by spruce ping ropeway (self-care ropeway 57 yuan and scenic area environmental protection car 20 yuan / person) on the snowy mountains, tour "high plateau pasture" - - Gan Haizi, Baishui River. Tour of the mountains and water, blue waves, known as the "small Jiuzhai" of the bright pearl of the natural ecological Grand Canyon "Blue Moon Valley" (does not include the cost of scenic area battery car), complimentary - "impression? Lijiang" performance (viewing time of about 90 minutes). Visit silverware store (shopping, about 90 minutes), complimentary tour of Lijiang Old Town's twin sister - Shuhe tea horse town, dinner by Lijiang train back to Kunming.

The above information extraction results, of the 7 excursions, only 3 stated the time of the tour, 5 mentioned the cost of the included or not the situation, the specifications are not uniform, the missing information elements are many.

Now, we draw on the drug specification to implement the standardization process, first of all the parameter information in the tourism itinerary preset, it contains the following kinds of data:

1, transportation parameters, such as airplanes, trains, buses, cruises, car + boat, boat + car, walking.

2, tour mode parameters, such as tour, way, boat tour, appearance, watch, participate, taste, experience, visit.

3, route classification data, ground, around, domestic, outbound.

4, supplier data, supplier name and business contacts.

5, destination data, the first level of data for the domestic + six continents, the second level is the domestic provinces + countries outside the country, the third level of domestic cities + cities outside the country, the fourth level of scenic spots + entertainment projects + food and beverage + shopping stores.

6, accommodation mode parameters, standard hotels (five, four, three-star hotels), fast hotels, farmhouse, resorts, yurts, campsites, airplanes, trains, ships, buses, and the standard of the room under it (such as standard rooms, triple rooms, king-size bed rooms, 2-3 people).

7, a variety of complimentary items information, such as: island clothing, a bottle of mineral water every day.

8, warm tips, booking instructions tips information, categorized according to the type of line, region, features, etc..

After the prefabrication is completed, you can format an itinerary article according to the specific content. For each tourist route itinerary, you need to manually enter the name of the route, the number of days of the trip, and the number of shopping trips; everything else can be selected directly and only by clicking on it from the information and data that has been preformatted.

In this process, two people are responsible for the initial recording and re-recording respectively. According to the same trip document, two people without knowing each other's entry process each entry once, the system will be reviewed. If the line review fails, it will prompt the entry of inconsistent places, until the revision of consistent; review through the line entry of the success of the line, that has been formatted to complete.

Example 1, for example, this line of product information formatted itinerary description can be clearly expressed as follows: 1, Lijiang departure; 2, visit the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, the tour process of about 1.5 hours, the main attractions under the scenic area of the Gan Hai Zi, the White Water River, the Blue Moon Valley, need to be self-funded spruce ping ropeways, environmental protection vehicles, Blue Moon Valley Battery; 3, watch the impression of the performance of Lijiang; 4, take the bus To Shuhe Chama ancient town, visited for 30 minutes (assuming that the number is the actual tour time after the implementation) 5, bus to Lijiang Railway Station; 6, take the train back to Kunming.

It can be seen that the product after the standardization of information is based on facts. For this line product specified, there is only one fact, which triggers the system's determination of the uniqueness of the travel agency's product.

After the line review is passed, the line is ready for line verification. Assuming that there are five main information duplicated with the new line, the system will compare the new line with these five lines one by one. If the comparison process finds a line that is always the same, then the line is a duplicate line and cannot be entered into the database. On the contrary, it is a new line and can be banked.

From the database principle of uniqueness determination, after the collection of lines after this format can be called "product library", product library of each product is a fixed format, but are unique, can be set to distinguish and search for number.

With the figure to express the words:

4. Travel agency line product information standardization implementation

We need to create a special mechanism according to the characteristics of the line product, the state in the tourism industry and the strong advocacy of macro-will and business and tourism consumers *** with the demand for linkage, and put into action to implement. Because this collection of information about the route product cannot be carried out in the same way as the implementation process of a specific tangible product such as a medicine or a part.

First, the direct relevance of drugs to human life is enough to cause everyone to pay attention to it in the production process, the manual has a review process, the product itself has a quality inspection process. This is not the case with travel agency route products, not only because of their intangibility, but also because they cannot wait for a long time for approval.

Secondly, although the country currently has a variety of local recommendations and recommended model itinerary, but the content of the itinerary is not a unified standard. The implementation of the strength is only recommended, and there is no corresponding incentives and penalties,

Third, because only a small number of tourists know about this recommended itinerary, and travel agencies want to get more of their own interests, seldom go to the use of the itinerary of the actual use of the efficiency of the greatly reduced.

We can deepen the above product pool and expand it on all fronts so that the relevant link organizations in the whole industry, such as wholesalers (offices) and retailers (tour operators), will work around it, and it will be supervised by the MGTO.

First of all, the wholesalers, after passing the MGTO's qualification examination, will be given their own client interface for a product library, with an independent login account and password, so that they can log in to add products and set up a supply relationship with the products that match their own scope of business (which they can add themselves, or other wholesalers can add them), and then they can maintain the prices, availability and availability of these products. Group period price, the remaining space to maintain and update.

Similarly, retailers can access the product library through a designated account to select any product for promotional marketing, and in the case of a product with multiple suppliers, the retailer can select any supplier. When packaging and marketing, the product number must be clearly labeled. In this way, no matter which marketing channel tourists purchase through, or see different promotional content of the same product, as long as through the number can be in the MGTO's product library to query the detailed information of the product of the route.

When a tourist buys a line of products, the organizing company and the consumer sign a travel contract to determine the rights and obligations of both parties. When signing a travel contract, a new type of electronic contract will be used, this unified format contract comes from the MGTO website system, each contract must be filled out on the website system before it can be downloaded, no matter whether it is the tourists or the travel agency, the process of filling out the contract will be in a strict format, except for a few numbers, most of the terms and conditions are not allowed to be manually entered, you can only select the options that are pre-set by the MGTO.

When the organizing agency will be informed of the tour information to the ground receiving agency, the ground receiving agency can be based on the specific circumstances of the tourists (the number of people, gender, age, the proportion of children and adults) to choose the tour guide and transportation and related services and facilities. And the choice of information resources is in advance prefabricated to establish a variety of resources involving tourism-related factors in the library, such as tour guide library, tourist garage, restaurant library and so on.

In the establishment of the relevant resources information base, in order to ensure that all resources have legitimate qualifications, should be established into the library standard, such as transportation related information to the Transportation Bureau record information as the standard, the tour guide to hold the tour guide qualification certificate as the standard.

Because of the relevant information has been entered into the information, the generation of electronic reception program becomes a process of information retrieval and consolidation. For example, the selection of tour buses, the group received for 20 people, then the staff can directly in the index to find 23-seat bus information resources, and then according to the need to choose, but also further understanding of its status, to see whether it has been booked by other travel agencies. If the status meets the need, then it can be determined and the intention will be passed on to the person in charge of the bus. If the bus owner agrees to participate in this tour, he or she can reply to the message. The reply to the message is a valid proof of the agreement between the two parties and avoids evasion of responsibility in case of future problems. By analogy, service facilities such as hotels and designated reception restaurants can complete the relevant tourism activity agreement through the electronic reception program, especially for tour guides. Because the current tourism industry does not have a clear explanation of who the tour guides belong to, the entire tour guide industry is not specifically regulated, and many black guides have appeared to defraud tourists and other undesirable phenomena. If the SMS platform is utilized to notify the tour guide of the time and place by SMS, and the tour guide can reply to the SMS if he agrees, a contractual relationship between the tour guide and the ground receiving agency will be established. In the information base will show the tour guide was booked time, other travel agencies in the period of time can not choose the tour guide.

There is also a situation when a tour guide has two tours to take at the same time, and will usually choose the more profitable one. With the SMS platform, if you dump a tour it is a breach of contract, and the ground receiving agent can hold the tour guide accountable, and the text messages sent by both parties through the SMS platform at the time are evidence of that. Similarly, restaurants and attractions can also be agreed through SMS. Especially for restaurants, the reservation can enable the restaurant to prepare ingredients according to the number of people booked, which reduces waste, and can arrange tourists in different meal times. For attractions, it is effective to avoid excessive reception, such as Taishan and Huashan, where excessive visitor reception will not only delay the tour time of each tour group, but also increase the level of danger. After the completion of tourism activities, the organizing company can evaluate the work of the relevant service providers according to the feedback of tourists, forming a scoring mechanism in the resource pool. This not only supervises them with public effectiveness, but also enhances the work motivation of the relevant enterprises and personnel from the side, and those with high scores will attract more customer resources. In order to make sure that nothing goes wrong, the system specially adds a GPS function to monitor the action track of each tour bus. If a tour service provider has a dispute with tourists due to unauthorized route changes or increased shopping points, the data recorded by GPS will be quite conducive to the resolution of the dispute between the two parties. As shown in the following figure:

Chapter 3: Current Situation of the Travel Agency Industry and Measures Taken by the Government

1. Current Situation of the Travel Agency Industry

1.1 Industry Situation of the Entity Travel Agency Industry

The following are the statistics of the number of travel agencies and their operation status in China in the past years. Figure 1:

YearTotal number of first-class agencies second-class agencies and third-class agencies

1987176775511245

199213670117552592

International travel agencies domestic travel agencies

199799139954986

200213581025711615

200717971714618943

20092009 the new travel agency regulations promulgated to abolish the classification of travel agencies 21649

201022784

Figure 2: 1994-2009 national travel agency industry business situation. Through Figure 1 we can clearly see that the number of travel agencies in China in the number of Chinese travel agencies in the reform and opening up since the rapid growth. But through Figure 2 we can see that the overall profitability of China's travel agencies has been declining, and in recent years the net profit margin has fallen to a few percent. However, there are still a large number of enterprises and personnel to enter the travel agency industry, indicating that this industry is not to rely on legitimate profits to maintain the operation of the industry, there are gray income to attract the entry of personnel. According to the National Tourism Administration issued the 2010 National Travel Agency Industry Circular data show that in 2010 the total assets of the national travel agency 66.614 billion yuan, 44.318 billion yuan of liabilities. And with large foreign travel agency groups such as Japan's JTB (Japan Transportation Bureau) compared to the words is even more dwarfed, which is the sadness of China's travel agency industry, but also a true reflection of China's travel agency industry.

The following chart for the CYTS 2007-2010 travel agency business revenue status table. Figure 3:

Unit: 100 million yuan Currency: RMB

Annual operating income net profit