Pricing Tourism Services and Products in Ethiopia: Evidencing from Lalibela Tourist Site
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Date
2021-10-20
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
Tourism provides products and services for consumers and consumers are motivated by needs, desires, and impulses that serve as driving forces. The tourism products may be a bundle of products purchased by the tourist or a single service offered by an individual producer. A tourism product is priced and sold through distribution channels and it has a life-cycle. Price is the solitary element in the marketing mix which actually produces revenue. Fixing of a price is never an easy work, since there are a number of pricing strategies which any tourism establishment may apply. These strategies include price discrimination, discount strategy, penetration pricing and price skimming. Additionally, a number of factors are determining what type of pricing strategy could be employed. Such factors include cost of production and market, competition, laws and regulations, demand and market structure, distribution channels, and customer behaviors among other matters. Pricing and pricing strategies are important aspects of business markets to improve the tourism services in the tourism industry. However, pricing of tourism products and services is not a well-articulated policy and strategy in Ethiopia, but comparatively the price is not much expensive compared with other African countries. To partially address the problem this study employs a descriptive research design to achieve its underlying objective. After analyzing the data, the research discovered that Government and legal regulations have the least effect on the pricing policies of tourism establishments, the majority of the tourism companies follow strategies based on various conditions at varied levels. This study primarily focused on assessing the potential pricing challenges, policies, strategies and determinant factors in the study area, reviewing the state-of-art on trends and approaches of pricing tourism products and services that helped the objective of the research partially achieved.
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Keywords
Tourism products, Pricing, Destination pricing, Pricing policies, Pricing strategies