eThesis - School of Business electronic theses

This thesis is first and foremost designed for the Finnish tour operator market. The study explores the trends of leisure travelling and the important traveller segments which have stimulated discussion both in Finland and abroad. The objective of this study is to help tour operators to further develop their package holiday offering and webpages by keeping in mind the significant traveller segments and prevailing trends of leisure travelling. Since the majority of package holidays are bought through tour operators' websites it is crucial that the operators' customers can easily find what they are looking for. Due to the fierce competition in the leisure travelling market it is also vital that tour operators are able to provide their customers with the right packages.

The report is meant to help the chosen tour operators to see in which areas they have room for improvements from consumers' point of view. Taking into consideration that the chosen case companies react to the results presented here, it should be the consumers who benefit from the publication of this research.

The study was conducted as a multiple case study. Five largest tour operators in the Finnish market were chosen for the research. Since most of the case companies present their whole offering only online and the majority of holidays are also sold through the operators' websites, primary data for the empirical part of this research were collected through the case companies' own websites. The case study findings were analysed with the help of Personas, which is a technique better known in the field of Service Design. Five personas were created for the study based on secondary research data.

The needs of travellers have become quite diversified. The study was able to recognize six traveller segments and ten trends that tour operators should be aware of. Based on the case findings, the studied companies have taken great notice of the recognized leisure travelling trends but still have a lot of room for improvements regarding their approach to different traveller segments.

On the basis of the results of this research, it can be concluded that the case study companies need to improve their holiday search engines and create separate pages for different trends and customer segments. Furthermore, the holiday packages offered by the case companies are currently more or less the same. In order to succeed, the companies should think how they could differentiate services to suit different customers with varying needs.