Late market launch in new product development: a case study in Saigontourist Travel Service company

Abstract

Tourism is a multi-service industry with numerous interesting opportunities, in which researching innovative destinations and developing product lines in tourism play an important role in a leading travel company as Saigontourist Travel Service Company, especially when outbound tours to China was on the edge of market saturation in 2019 – before the Covid-19 epidemic. Therefore, many Chinese travel suppliers dynamically produced new exclusive tour products and introduce them to travel agencies in Vietnam. This requirement must be adapted, even if Saigontourist is a well-known leading travel firm in Vietnam. The author has chosen a real case of outbound new tour to Inner Mongolia launched at that time and looked for the department’s disease to treat. The symptoms included many aspects of the fact that the Inner Mongolia new tour was underperformed. According to further investigation of the analytic data, the main problem was draw out as a late market launch of the new tour in the organization. The root cause of the aforementioned problem found is slow consideration of outbound collective management in new tour development process. As a result, two alternative solutions have been proposed to develop in the new normal period with the solution focusing on the digital transformation – building project management process for the STS outbound collective section's internal operations, which contributes to the efficiency of new tour launch and the sustainable tourism development.