October 30, 2012

Concept and Meaning Of Itinerary

Itinerary is known as a tour plan. It is related to the tour programs, timetable and the information of the places to be visited. A program includes only activities, whereas, an itinerary includes date, day, time duration and points of interests between the destinations, on the way to the destination, the special features of the tour and happenings at the destination etc.

An itinerary is the combination of the different components of tourism to form a product ready for sale. So, it explains and shows how different components of tourism are joined together. Travel was there since a long time but there was no tourism. Hotels were there, transport or movements of the people were there but there was no tourism because there was no joint or coordinated effort. By the introduction of the travel agency, there came the concept of tourism. When there developed the joint effort then there came the concept of tourism.

Travel agencies produce the tourism product, that is to produce itinerary. Now the tour is sold as a single product. Tourism is defined as sum of the total activities related to travel and stay and itinerary joins that travel and stay together to form a product. Itinerary is the commodification of tour.

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Itinerary is developed to perform the sales process. It tries to solve the problems created by service nature, "here and there" nature and synchronized effort nature. Tangible products are weighted, measured but service is measured in duration. Itinerary is prepared to identify the duration of service, tangible and intangible nature of service, solves the problem of immovability of tourism products. The other interesting fact  of tourism is to have point of sales (POS) and point of service delivery (POSD) in different places.

Itinerary solves the problems of joint efforts also. An itinerary is the combination of the different components of the tourism to form a product ready to sale. So, it explains how different components of tourism are joined together. The travel agencies produce the tourism product that is to produce the itinerary.