Tourism Website Services Business Plan

The tourism market in Mexico is enormous. In 1998, according to The Bank of Mexico, 19.8 million international tourists traveled to Mexico and spent over six billion dollars.

350 major hotels and thousands of smaller travel destinations serviced these tourists. Increasingly tourists are researching and booking travel using the Internet.

There are 20 travel websites already and this number is projected to increase by 100% by the end of 2001.

The company plans to target the large resorts that don’t yet have a website and expand into the thousands of smaller destinations as the business develops.

The company will approach this market primarily through advertising. Our advertising will serve two different functions.

First, we will use testimonials from reference accounts to expose the benefits of our services to tourism operators.

Second, we will use advertising through trade publications and direct mail to establish a brand that the Mexican tourism industry will associate with high-quality professional services.

4.1 Market Segmentation

We broadly divide our market between resort hotels and other travel destinations. Within resort hotels we segment between 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 star hotels.

Within other travel destinations we include apartments, bed and breakfast, suits, villas, condos, trailer parks, and bungalows.

Within the category of resort hotels, we define large resorts as being 4 or 5 star hotels.

We define smaller resorts as 3 or 4 star hotels. Please note this analysis counts 4 star hotels twice.

In addition, we have excluded 1 and 2 star hotels entirely. Furthermore the company believes these estimates are conservative because they exclude the major beach resort areas such as Acapulco, Puerto Vayarta, Cancun, Zihuatenejo, Ixtapa, etc.

4.2 Target Market Segment Strategy

The company’s market strategy is to focus on resort hotels and tourist travel destinations in Mexico that meet two important criteria.

First, we are targeting the segments of the market that can afford Web-based promotion.

Second, we are targeting those segments of the market that can benefit from a presence on the World Wide Web.

The company has gathered market data from the official Mexican tourism website. To be conservative, we gathered data that excludes the major beach resort areas.

Many of the major beach resorts already have websites. Although we intend to target those areas as well, for purposes of this analysis, we have left them out of the numerical totals. If they were included, these resorts would approximately double the number of large resorts. Smaller resorts and other travel destinations would also be affected, but by a smaller amount.

Although there are many more 1 and 2 star hotels then any other category, the company decided to exclude them because their segment can neither afford nor benefit from a presence on the World Wide Web.

We decided to include 4 star hotels in both large and small resort segments because we predict that 4 star operators will divide themselves between large and small service offerings.

It is also important to note that many of the 4 and 5 star hotels are controled by resort chains, where as the smaller hotels tend to be individually owned.

Furthermore, 5 star hotels often have affiliations with other travel destinations such as golf courses. Also note that the predicted 10% growth rate was estimated by the company, not by the tourism board.