Business tourism in France

Résumé du document

Working in a family business, named DESERTOURS™, we perform in a challenging and competitive market: tourism. With twenty years experience, DESERTOURS™ is the 4WD and motorcycle adventure travel leader in the French market. Our company offers trips around the world, including Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, Okavango, Namibia, Madagascar, Venezuela and the United States. Over the past ten years, DESERTOURS™ has diversified its range of skills and is now organizing sports events such as 4L TROPHY™, a 4L orientation race in the Moroccan desert, reserved for students, as well as the Roses des Sables Trophy™, a 4WD, quads and motorcycle woman-only race.

Interested to develop incentives in the French market, the main target of this study is to “provide us information to guide managerial decisions” (Cooper & Schindler 2006: 4). We will find “strategies and tactics to capture the highest return” in the business tourism segment (Cooper & Schindler 2006: 5). In this way, we will be focused on the specific market of business tourism: meetings, incentives, conferences, exhibitions, outdoor events, individual business travels.

This composition would be presented in nine parts: first of all, it is obvious to bear in mind the problem our research is required to solve and its objectives. Then, we offer a preliminary literature review, then a concise research design, a data collection strategy and a sampling design. Furthermore, we will analyze ethical issues in relation with our study and our limitations. Last, we will give a data analysis plan.

Extraits

[...] - An actual routine study: Here we study the perceptions of participants in the research. They will perceive deviation from everyday routines”. The aim is not to make participants aware of a conducted study. After giving an overview of the research design, it is judicious to establish a data collection strategy. The data collection strategy In this section, we are going to determine how the data are collected. According to Cooper and Schindler (2006: data are facts presented to the researcher from the study's environment”. [...]

[...] We are in a qualitative investigation. Offer and supply: Most of the cases, we will study business tourism from a supply perspective: accommodation facilities show rooms, events organisation agencies Our research would be about what France can do to be more successful. In this way, we will be focus on its weaknesses and what can change in the future, in relation with the new trends. It will be more a statement of the French situation with recommendations than an observation of international demand, even this one would also be analysed, in a smaller scale. [...]

[...] A limited place of investigation: As we said in the problem statement, the target is to find solutions about France. In this way, one of the limitations is the restricted place. By convenience, we prefer to analyse a smaller place than the USA or Europe. Conclusions would be really specific to France and could not be generalised on a global scale. A sampling of managers: As we said in the sampling design and because we want to work in a business perspective, we will study managers' opinions. This is coherent because we deal with business tourism. [...]

[...] Concerning our study, in developing a “precise” and “accurate” sampling design, we have to answer five main questions (Cooper and Shindler 2006: pp. 409-414): 1. What is the target population? 2. What are the parameters of interest? 3. What is the sampling frame? 4. What is the appropriate sampling method? 5. What size sample is needed? [...]

[...] Written by Buhalis and Costa, the authors called them: Tourism Business Frontiers: Consumers, Products and Industry (2006) and Tourism Management Dynamics: Trends, Management and Tools (2004). The fist one deals with the new issues in the tourism industry, generated by its actors: consumers, products and operators. The second one focuses on changes within the tourism market: how to adapt management strategies to face the new trends? They both provide a huge international overview and global perspectives of tourism. They are well written and easy-to-read. They give us a high-quality synthesis of the tourism industry with a practical value. [...]