Master thesis : "Little Guest : London or Berlin Calling ? Comparative analysis and international marketing research to prepare abroad expansion and new market penetration".

Abstract

The objective of this work was to help my client Little Guest, a scale-up founded in 2017 as an online travel agency active in the family luxury travel business sector to decide which of the two major European tourism markets, the UK or Germany, to prioritize for expansion. This work is divided in three parts, themselves divided in sections. Each section begins with a specific introduction and finish with a specific conclusion as well. The reader can easily jump from one section to another by reading these subsections as he/she pleases. The first part is dedicated to the theoretical approach. The goal is, thanks to an extensive scientific and business literacy review, to draw a clear panorama of the tourism businesss notably by using the simple Leiper’s model (Leiper in Cooper 2020) of tourism business. We analyse the tourism business player, rules of the game and power distribution on the value chain. We create on our own a conceptual cross referencing of the family luxury travel business activity. The last section is dedicated to concepts such as business internationalization and the challenges to face during these processes. After this part, I will introduce Little Guest as a business case in order for the reader to get to know the company, its history and current situation. I will explain the strategy, successes, failures, and the challenges it has been facing so far. During this section a lot of useful analysis tools learned during the MBA are mobilized; business model canvas, swot, pestel, financial analysis and the Hollensen’s business internationalization “Macs Matrix” added to our own analysis grid built in the light of the concepts discovered in part one. The second part of the work is dedicated to data analysis, secondary and primary. The secondary data analysis gathers all the already existing studies we could get our hands on, that have been carried out on the subject UK and German family tourism markets. This in order to buy us a lot of time by not reinventing the wheel after during the primary data analysis. We recognize the potential of both markets and discover some particularities and barrier to entry such as ATOL certificate in the UK. During this phase we also conduct a competition scan and apply concretely the Macs Matrix by comparing Little Guest to two good performing competitors, one in the UK and one in Germany via a series of business criteria and mystery shopping processes. This enables us to give a first quotation of each market for Little Guest Based on these learnings, the primary data analysis is carried out with two surveys. The firs one is qualitative with a sample of Little Guest’s hotel partners where we specifically ask these partners about their UK and German market. We discover during that phase some practical particularities that enables the upgrade of our research design for the next survey. We then carry out an online quantitative survey with the UK and German customers and prospects where results are presented, discussed and every business assumption challenged. We mostly learn that the major differences between the two markets are in the family luxury travel buying process and OTA’s influential elements of choice both in favor of the UK regarding Little Guest’s perspective, obviously not in general, the family luxury travel preferences being common. In the third and last part, we proceed to our recommendations and advise our customer to start with the UK first in a continuous internationalization implementation plan by locally joint venturing and/or franchising national partners already active in the business and taking care of the B2C side of the business. After usual critical review and further research opportunities, we finally conclude.