The Typology of Hotel's Services For Travel Agencies, Case Study: The Five-Star Hotels in Mashhad

Accommodations and hotels are among the most important components of any tourist attraction. Hotel's managers must review concepts of their marketing strategies. This necessitates the analysis of the characteristics which are considered by their customers, including business intermediaries (specially, travel agencies or tour operators) or end users (tourists), to distinguish a hotel's brand from others. Then they can define their product. Based on the literature and interviews with some members of the population and some academic experts, research's conceptual model was developed. This paper is aimed to offer a typology for services of Five-star hotels in Mashhad for travel agencie's managers, their most important industrial customers. This research is an applied research and in terms of data collecting, it is a descriptive survey. All the travel agencie's managers in Tehran, which directly offer travel packages to Mashhad with staying in Five-star hotels, are the population of this survey. Here, manager means, CEO, B technical manager, internal manager & tour manager. Size of the sample was estimated 218 by Cochran's formula. To gain the objectives of the research, after a review of the past researches and developing the conceptual model, research's questionnaire was designed. The questionnaire contained 31 main questions about the importance the identified service attributes. The questionnaire was distributed among travel agencie's managers in Tehran. The collected data was analyzed by applying confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and a software, named Lisrel. According to the results, different kinds of hotels’ services for travel agencies can be categorized respectively as "core product", "facilitating services" and "enhancing services". Using SPSS, we found out that the involvement of females is more than males. Most of the respondents were young, high educated, but in irrelevant fields of studies. The percentage of the questionnaires which were fulfilled by tour managers were more than other ones. It is wonderful that more than half of the respondents had work experience less than five years. On the other hand, respectively, hotel's web site, visit the hotels, and the attitudes of the costumers of the agents, were the most common tools to get information about the hotels under study.