The projects embarked on by tourism organizations in the course of introducing new services to the marketplace is referred to as new product development in tourism.
In its entirety, it is a sequential process involving various steps from idea generation to commercialization of tourist service.
From the viewpoint of the entire organization, it is an ongoing process and there is every likelihood of diverse promising services at different phases of development at a time. The products with adequately enough level of innovation for consumers and entailing redesigning of marketing strategies can, indeed, be considered as new products.
Image Source: studymauritius.info
ADVERTISEMENTS:
For successful functioning, growth and exuberance of tourist organizations, continual upgradation of existing products as well as the induction of new ones is not only desirable but necessary, too.
Moreover, customers always have a fancy for new products, and competitors will strive to provide the desired, thereby the generation of abstractions for novel products and to launch them successfully emerges as one of the critical challenges in marketing planning for an organization.
The new product-planning gap can be bridged in two fashions: Acquisition or New Product Development. The acquisition course can further accept three forms: Corporate Acquisition, Patent Acquisition, and License Acquisition; whereas the new product route can adopt two basic shapes: Internal new product development or Contract new product development. The core focus is on new product development approach in tourism as a growth strategy.
ADVERTISEMENTS:
An efficacious continual new tourism product development activity facilitates diversification and thereby may experience competitive advantage in addition to incremented sales, profits, reduction of financial risk of failure and goading the sales of complementary products.
Nevertheless in the modern competitive world, the tourism organizations preferring to stick to traditional products rather going for new ones may find themselves in a precarious situation unable to cope with the changing consumers’ needs and tastes, advanced technologies, truncated product life cycles i.e., early saturation of their product market, and increased internal (domestic) and external (foreign) competition. New products are, indeed, the driving force for the long-term health of a business.