Samenvatting

Positive Travels is an online company that organises trips for business companies and for people who want to go on a holiday for leisure purposes. It was developed from its parent company Positive Business Events. Positive Travels offers trips with different themes and trips are mostly tailor-made.
Positive Travels is a new company and it faces many competitors in the market who offer the same product. This means that it has to show what makes them different and show originality so that they can face the competition. The company also has no specific customer group and that is why it targets a broad group of people. This is another challenge in a very competitive market and has inspired the main question for this final project, which is what strategy must Positive Travels apply to be more profitable?
Through desk research and field research a market description as well as an internal and external analysis were made. The market description showed that Positive Travels has a broad target group consisting of the business market and the private market. The business market wants tailor-made trips and claim the costs at their company whereas the private market wants relaxing trips with some activities.
The internal analysis showed that the fact that Positive Travels is associated with other ventures is its strength; its weaknesses are that it lacks employees with specific knowledge of the travel industry and there is an absence of a clearly defined target group.
In the external analysis the DESTEP analysis displayed that the Internet is rapidly growing and social media and smartphones are becoming more popular. The five forces of Porter showed that it is a difficult time for travel agencies and that customers prefer booking a vacation by themselves. In the competitor analysis it became clear that Positive Travels has more chances in the travel industry if it competes with incentive travel agencies rather than travel agencies in the private market.
From the field research that was conducted with business and private customers it was clear that respondents wanted to see the website improve and wanted to know what distinguishes Positive Travels from other travel organisations.
What strategy must Positive Travels apply to be more profitable? Maria José dos Reis
Academy of European Studies & Communication Management
From the confrontation analysis it became clear that the company should focus on the business market because it has more chances in that market. The marketing mix showed that Positive Travels should promote the company in more ways than only social media and it needs to hire more people to solely focus on Positive Travels.
The analyses and field research resulted in recommending Positive Travels to focus on the business market. In this way the company has a better chance of being more profitable in the near future by competing with incentive agencies.