Optimal Pricing Design Based on Preference Values of Purchasing Restrictions for Tour Products

Tour products have been recognized as a perishable asset. For tour operation companies (TOCs), improving profitability is a core decision problem for their business. Since package tour products, typical products of TOCs, are perishable after the tour was departed, TOCs have been tried to increase their sales before the departure date with various marketing strategies including price discounts. The pricing problem for perishable assets have been studied in Revenue Management for a long time. However, it is hard to find a research on pricing decisions for tour products. In this paper, we focus on a pricing problem for tour products. In particular, we will consider the pricing scheme with customer preference values on purchasing conditions. With conjoint analysis, we can use the part-worth value as a preference value for each level of purchasing conditions. To construct various discount prices, we use an enumeration method and suggest a mathematical optimization model. With experimental analysis for a sample tour package, we will show that our pricing process is very helpful for designing customer-oriented pricing decision.