Pricing in Tourism Industry: Chinese Experience

<p>Currently, there is a large-scale tourist sector in Chinese business, and it continues to grow even further. The tourist sector in China combines both government and market regulation. This peculiarity has an effect on pricing policies of Chinese tourist companies. Since Chinese tourist market is dynamic and rapidly growing, it is topical to research how pricing in this sector differs from pricing in other sectors.</p><p>The aim of this work is to analyze peculiarities of pricing in the tourist sector, narrowing it down to Chinese tourist market as an example of how pricing strategies are implemented in this sector. In accordance with that, the following tasks were set: to characterize the tourist sector; to define peculiarities of pricing in this sector; to compare different methods of pricing used in the tourist business; to describe the main Chinese tourist companies; to develop a tour for a company, entering Chinese tourist market.</p><p>The present paper describes the most important statistics characterizing current situation on the world tourist market, current situation on the Chinese tourist market and its main market players, explains the process of developing pricing policies in tourist companies and the main methods of pricing in the tourist sector.</p><p>Government control in Chinese economy leads to lower market orientation of Chinese tourist companies comparing to tourist companies in other countries and lower level of competition from foreign companies. Due to this this fact, it is supposed in the paper that Chinese companies use cost-plus, aggregation and current price methods of pricing.</p><p>The paper also includes an example of a Beijing-Xian-Guilin-Shanghai tour cost calculations on the basis of cost-plus and aggregation methods.</p>