Potential customers for tailor-made travel service in Vietnamese outbound tourims market

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis is to identify the potential customers for the tailor-made travel service provided for Vietnamese traveling abroad. This serves as the pilot study for further feasibility study on the authors’ business idea of establishing a tailor-made travel company. Hence, the finding of this study is expected to guide the startup’s upcoming research and to fill in the gap of knowledge of the founder. Before the study, the startup expects its target customer groups to be (1) the struggling travelers in trip planning, (2) the busy workers and (3) those who seeking for special travel experience. Moreover, these customers should have a medium-level income to afford the service. In this study, the potential customers are defined primarily based on their purchase intention, purchase ability and attitude towards the tailor-mades service. An opinion survey was conducted on Facebook for data collection. The demographic information, travel habits and attitude toward tailor-made travel of 115 respondents were collected. 105 valid answers were used for the data analysis with SPSS. The result points out to an unexpected potential customer group, the Vietnamese young adults among 18 and 30 years old. They appear to be a potential customer group for the tailor-made travel service, due to their positive attitude toward the service and high purchase intention. However, their current purchase ability is relatively low. The groups’ average annual income can afford limited choices of travel destination and a low annual travel frequency to foreign countries. The startup is recommended to focus its official market feasibility study on the original target customer groups, but not switching to the newly discovered one. As there are methodological limitations in this study, the survey result is homogenous and could not present the interest of the whole population. More reliability tests on its findings are thus needed in the future.