Askalocal International Marketing

Figuring out how much to price a tourism product or service is often difficult, as a number of factors must be taken into consideration. Unlike other tourism products which usually involve a tourism business selling their product to a consumer (for example, business to customer (b2c)), a product such as a user generated website like Askalocal will be available to use by consumers for no cost. Instead they will be selling to tourism providers and businesses (for example business-to-business (b2b)) the opportunity to advertise and promote. There are a number of different internal factors that all must be taken into consideration to determine pricing of any tourism product or service. Those of relevance to such a product like Askalocal include,

Some of the key features required to develop an appropriate and functional website include, a review and rating system, a membership login in order for locals to sign in to review as well as being able to monitor each review and possibly a booking function. The website will be developed by working with a digital tourism marketing service that specialises in website design (i.e. Tomahawk). Website development costs through such services can vary depending on the overall size and amount of features used. Executionists is a US company that develops websites for business, they charge on average $7000 to $40,000 for developing websites (Executionists,

Although the concept behind Askalocal slightly differs (i.e. they only allow locals to review) from TripAdvisor, the way in which TripAdvisor generates revenue will be similar to how Askalocal will. TripAdvisor predominantly makes money through click-based advertising, in the year ending 31st December 2015 64% of their total revenue was from click-based advertising (TripAdvisor, 2015). This is driven by metasearch (e.g. search results show hotel prices from both Expedia, Wotif and so on) (Cocotas, 2011; Yoo, Sigala, & Gretzel, 2016). Additionally, TripAdvisor provides a service called TripConnect (i.e. is a payed service) for businesses to bid on metasearch traffic that will show their offer or hotel first in a search results page (Yoo, Sigala, & Gretzel, 2016). For example, this can be seen when doing a general search such as “Hotels in Auckland” on TripAdvisor. The hotels displayed first in the search and also the OTA’s that are displayed in the price list within a Trip Advisor page (i.e. Hotel DeBrett) have payed to be there, which will hopefully help then get more leads (i.e. clicks) onto their TripAdvisor page or