Dai Bin | From Travel Agency to Travel Service Provider, Industrial Changes and Theoretical Reconstruction - Preface to the Fifth Edition of Travel Agency Management

Recently, the fifth edition of "Travel Agency Management" edited by Dean Dai Bin of China Tourism Research Institute and published by Higher Education Press was published. Dean Dai Bin wrote the preface for this book, and the full text is as follows:

As one of the achievements of the reform and practice project of the curriculum system and teaching content for tourism management majors in the 21st century, "Travel Agency Management" (first edition) was included in the main course textbooks of tourism management majors in higher education institutions. It was published and distributed by Higher Education Press in July 2002 and widely adopted by tourism colleges and universities. To meet the needs of tourism industry development, travel agency industry innovation, and teaching practice, the writing team released updated versions in March 2005, July 2009, and September 2017. In order to maintain the continuity and integrity of the textbook system, while also considering the innovation and applicability of teaching content, the fifth edition will continue to be co edited by Professor Dai Bin and Dr. Zhang Yang. Special invitations have been extended to professionals in teaching, research, and practice, such as Dr. Yin Yingmei, Dr. Li Yin, Dr. Chai Yan, and Professor Zhou Hongbo, to join the writing team. The writing objectives, revision points, and chapter design of this textbook mainly reflect the following ideas and characteristics. 1、 Cultivating students' professional thinking and core values of travel services is like the fission of stars in the universe, industrial division of labor in human history, and travel agencies in tourism activities. It is neither innate nor unchanging. Whether it's Emperor Qin Shi Huang's eastern tour, Emperor Qianlong's tour of Jiangnan, or Li Bai's one-day visit to the Thousand Mile Jiangling Mausoleum, or Xu Xiake's grand literary tour from Ninghai to the West Gate; Whether it's geographical discoveries or European study tours, they all rely on itinerary planning, food supply, and local customs. However, these services are customized for specific groups through public institutions, family resources, or personal influence. In the long course of history, the vast majority of people were unable to embark on this type of travel. The reason why Thomas Cook's decades long train prohibition journey, initiated in 1841, was able to go down in history and become a milestone event in modern tourism is because it was the first time that professional and efficient travel services were provided to everyone in a commercial way, because the urban class could also achieve their travel dreams by purchasing commercial services. In 1923, the Chinese travel agency founded by Mr. Chen Guangfu, a banker, was still remembered by the industry a hundred years later because he found business opportunities from the travel scenes of countrymen people rather than from textbooks, developed products based on the actual needs of tourists, rather than copying the sales manuals of European and American travel agencies. Early Chinese travel agencies included luggage handling services for passengers transferring to trains in their service list, making themselves friends that foreign travelers could rely on. After the outbreak of the War of Resistance Against Japan, travel agencies shifted their focus to transporting strategic materials and cultural heritage until they exhausted all their resources and the ability to restart. A company that serves the people, an industry recognized by the country, will always have the soil for survival and growth space. Whether it grows into trees or flowers is just an external form. However, how are our textbooks written? The vast majority of versions are deeply influenced by the triple factors of theory, history, and law, to the point where teachers and students often see society but not people. Once they leave the classroom and textbooks, they may not even know how to engage in dialogue with reality, and in turn, they become deeply skeptical of theory and textbooks, unable to extricate themselves. Purely theoretical textbooks limit their service targets to non-profit tourists. In fact, there has never been a world-class travel agency that does not include business, official, and business travelers in their main market. This is true for Japan's Transportation Corporation, American Express, and China's Ctrip and Caesar. From a historical perspective, the first generation of market-oriented travel agencies in China were engaged in the inbound tourism market from the day they entered the market, receiving tour groups. This was true for state-owned companies such as CITS, CTS, and CYTS, as well as private companies like Chunqiu, Zhongxin, and Nanhu. From the perspective of laws and regulations, such as the "Regulations on the Administration of Travel Agencies" and its implementation rules, although the business scope of travel agencies has been expanded to attract and receive visitors, the genes of package price, team and sightseeing are still inseparable from their essence. The rise of mass tourism and the blessing of the Internet have left traditional travel industry regulators and practitioners at a loss for more than 20 years. In 2020, the COVID-19 made the industry sigh of "no choice but to spend". From a legal perspective, all history is contemporary history, and laws, regulations, and administrative rules must also keep pace with the times. Only by returning to the foundation of travel and the source of service, teaching and learning, can we firmly establish the concept of "providing professional services for travelers" from the complex phenomena. With ideals and values, we can achieve stability and success in the construction of knowledge in the classroom and in our future career. Starting from now, explore the origin and look forward to the future. What is it now? The leisure life during the epidemic has not stopped, while the travel agency industry has almost stagnated. It is an irreversible recovery of the tourism and travel market under the normalization of epidemic prevention and control. Apart from sighing one after another, travel agencies have no ideas or ways to stop them from sliding from the center of the tourism economic system to the edge. Whether we like it or not, the traditional era of travel agencies is about to become history, and a broader and more promising era of travel services is unfolding. The chapters of this book are presented in a question and answer format, with levels, logic, and writing style not limited to existing textbooks of the same type, including the first four editions of this book. For example, replacing "the historical process of travel agencies" with "the past and present of travel agencies", replacing "the status and role of travel agencies" with "whether the de establishment of travel agencies is a coincidence caused by the epidemic or an inevitable change in the tourism market", and replacing "the institutional and market innovation of travel agencies" with "travel agencies are the phoenix rebirth of travel agencies". In fact, in 2020, the China Tourism Group Development Forum launched ten cases of cultural and tourism integration, especially the Palace Museum to the east of China Travel, the "Architecture Readable, Urban Micro Tourism" of Spring and Autumn, Ctrip's destination marketing, Caesar's air catering, etc., indicating that travel agencies have achieved initial victories in their transformation into travel service providers. 2、 Developing a knowledge system for students to discover travel needs and product development. Military academies aim to train soldiers who know both why to fight and how to win. Students trained in tourism colleges must have clear professional thinking and self-development skills after leaving school. The reason why travel agencies exist is because there is a demand for travel services from tourists in the market, rather than the need for tourism and travel services only with travel agencies. For the complex and ever-changing tourism demands, if travel agencies cannot fully grasp and effectively meet them, market mechanisms will create updated commercial forms to meet this demand. The needs of tourists include but are not limited to information acquisition, ticketing and travel document processing, transportation, accommodation, catering, shopping, cultural experience, community interaction and sharing. These linear needs from departure to return, as well as living needs in specific spaces, may be fulfilled by travel agencies, alternative institutions such as community economy, relationships with family and friends, and direct transactions with resource providers and suppliers. Only with a market mindset and starting from consumption can practitioners understand the land they stand on and the space for growth. As long as traditional tourists such as business, exhibitions, leisure, and vacations, as well as new types of tourists such as academic, cultural, adventure, and self driving, and as long as people's poetry and distant dreams require professional services; As long as airlines, hotels and resorts, scenic spots and theme parks, catering, shopping, theaters, museums need distribution channels, market entities and practitioners can overcome many foreseeable or unforeseeable difficulties and move forward sustainably through continuous exploration and innovation. These require us to systematically and solidly master the basic theories, tools, and methods of travel services and product development. So, what are travel agency products? The standard answers given in past textbooks were package price products, semi package price products, small package price products, and single item services. This definition is a typical "ground team" perspective, and future tourism products must and can only start from the tourism market and consumer demand, systematically introducing a new perspective of "research and development sales" and "individual destination lifestyle". From the perspective of tourists' new expectations for a beautiful journey and the experience of a beautiful life at the destination, the tourism market has never had a standardized product that remains unchanged, nor has there been a consumer demand that will never return. Good tourism products are designed rather than imitated, and high-quality services are up-to-date rather than static. They can effectively meet existing tourism and travel needs, and can also incorporate innovative products into tourists' consumption lists through promotion and advertising. Therefore, in the new era, travel agency or travel business management textbooks must comprehensively introduce product thinking and tell learners what kind of products can meet consumers' travel needs. With good products, we also need to focus on service innovation. In the past, it mainly relied on frontline tour guides and internal quality control within the company. Whether the mountains and rivers of our motherland are beautiful or not depends entirely on the tour guide's words. Until today, tour guides are still typical tourism practitioners and serve as observation windows for the level of tourism services. Narrowly defined tour guides refer to personnel who have obtained a tour guide certificate issued by the tourism administrative department and are practicing in travel agencies. Broadly defined tour guides include full-time guides, local guides, tour guides, and outbound tour leaders. From a historical, systematic, and comprehensive perspective, tour guide teams do play a positive role in the development of tourism, especially in the operation of travel agencies. "Because of you, thousands of books are easy to read and thousands of miles are easy to travel. Entering a new era of mass tourism, the media continues to expose negative information such as forced consumption, fraudulent consumption, and induced consumption, causing the social status and economic income of tour guides to spiral downward. In this era, relying solely on traditional training and assessment is no longer sufficient to maintain the service level of tour guides and the service quality of travel agencies. Although administrative supervision from the tourism department and quality control within travel agencies have ensured a steady increase in service levels and tourist satisfaction in window industries such as travel agencies, there is a lack of effective industry guidance and professional improvement methods for online and offline travel merchants serving individual business travelers and independent travelers. The power of change comes more from market changes and technological advancements. With the maturity of people's travel experience and the progress of mobile Internet technology, tourists are more inclined to self travel and customized travel, rather than follow the standardized process of travel agencies in the form of team travel. The shortening of the sales process for resource providers and the expansion of distribution channels, as well as the widespread use of big data and artificial intelligence by platform providers, have made the profit margin for travel agencies based on information asymmetry increasingly small. Compared to the rapidly growing and ever-changing tourism market, relying on tour guides, planners, and quality control personnel to improve service levels has made travel agencies feel inadequate. Therefore, travel agencies can only accelerate digital transformation and market innovation, and use smart tourism technology, tools, and methods to achieve systematic upgrades in service quality. The coupling of capital and technology will further enhance the organic composition of capital and labor productivity of travel agencies, and will also create crowding out effects on their existing labor markets, requiring necessary intervention and optimization by entrepreneurs and professional managers. 【 Chapter Design 】 From external (resources, markets) to internal (products, services), this section aims to enable future practitioners to master the ability to transform natural resources, historical and cultural resources, and contemporary lifestyles into tourism products based on their understanding of the public's travel capabilities and consumption preferences. External resources must be able to be productized through branding, routes, projects, services, advertising, and pricing strategies, rather than broadly incorporating resources that we cannot control into the procurement scope and processing process. People's understanding of tourism resources is mainly limited to traditional natural resources such as mountains, waters, forests, and grasslands, as well as cultural resources such as historical relics, intangible cultural heritage, and written classics. In addition, it also includes advanced socialist culture and modern lifestyles. In most cases, travel agencies do not have the ability to develop natural and historical cultural resources at the primary level, which is the responsibility of scenic area and resort developers, urban, neighborhood, and beautiful rural construction institutions. Travel agencies should consider commercial institutions such as hotels, homestays, resorts, airlines, high-speed trains, restaurants, shopping centers, exhibition halls, as well as cultural institutions such as museums, art galleries, theaters, and sports event organizers as their resource suppliers. The external market must be a market where travel agencies have the ability to provide services, and no travel agency can indiscriminately include travelers from all over the country and even the world in their target market. This book introduces the concept of dynamic evolution, allowing learners to understand how travel agencies meet demand through products and services, and how they grow from small to large under the influence of market mechanisms. The fifth edition abandons the static perspective and standardized narrative style of various functional management based on internal departments, and focuses on product research and service design as the key content, because no matter which university graduates, they cannot immediately enter management positions, but must start from the front line. It should be pointed out that we do not want to train students to become skilled workers on the service industry assembly line. Instead, we need to teach them how to know what they are and why, and prepare them with knowledge and psychological preparation to work hard in the market. Whether the product is presented in the form of sightseeing routes, vacation experiences, or overnight rural accommodations, it must be sellable through travel companies and perceivable by tourists. 3、 Developing students' ability to transform travel needs and innovative momentum into products and services, macroeconomics and a big historical perspective can enable us to look far ahead and see the forest of travel services and tourism economy, so that we will not get lost in the process of learning specific specialized knowledge, and then grasp specific tools and methods to clarify the goals we want to achieve. For learners of travel service management, having only macro level thinking and a demand side perspective is far from enough. They also need to start from the supply side, establish organizations with management practice thinking, transform the concept of quality service into concrete products and services, establish the stickiness between enterprises and customers, and promote the sustainable development of travel agencies. We need to teach students how to sell the developed products and designed services. The knowledge, tools, and methods taught in professional courses such as marketing and sales management are reflected in this book, such as establishing distribution channels and managing agents. In terms of case selection and introduction of knowledge points, this book actively introduces new customer acquisition ideas such as community marketing, "grass planting" and "check-in", IP building and peripheral development, and user generated content. With the advent of the era of interconnectivity and digital survival, tourists often actively or passively intervene in various aspects of production and distribution during their travels. If the textbook continues to adhere to the traditional marketing mindset of "I promote, you accept" and "I sell, you purchase", it is likely to lead to a vicious cycle of teachers' aversion to teaching and students' aversion to learning. Introducing lively real-life scenarios and the creativity of young people is an essential driving force to break the cycle of low-level teaching. We need to teach students how to meet all the needs of tourists before, during, and after their trip to the fullest extent possible. These needs may be explicitly expressed by tourists or may be implicit. The demand for mass tourism after the comprehensive construction of a moderately prosperous society is diverse and hierarchical, and unchanging thinking and standards cannot meet the tourism needs of contemporary people. We need to introduce technological means and digital tools to construct an information collection, analysis, intervention, and feedback system to achieve basic satisfaction among tourists. To introduce the concepts of cultural creativity and artistic guidance to enhance tourists' experience and satisfaction. To this end, we must have a sense of keeping up with the times and comprehensively utilize technology, culture, and society