Schütte

CenterParks Schütte

Seminar paper from the year 2002 in the subject Tourism, grade: -, University of Lincoln (Tourism), course: Strategic Management of Tourism, 20 entries in the bibliography, language: English, comment: The basis of my coursework was with reference to an organisation of my choice to identify the main features of the companies current strategy and to assess the appropriatness of its current strategy in relation to the main strategic challenges which it will have to face in order to improve or maintain its competitive position in the future. , abstract: A key question in strategy research is why companies diverge in their conduct and profitability. Researchers have determined to view companies as autonomous entities, striving for competitive advantage from either external sources, or from internal resources and capabilities. (Gulati/Nohria/Zaheer (2000): 203) Certainly, the objective of a company's strategy is achieving competitive advantage, but additionally, the strategy itself is a source of competitive advantage. (Luffman/ Lea/ Sanderson/ Kenny (1996): 102) The intensifying competition on the "world marketplace" (Wright/ Kroll/ Parnell (1998): 281) is a great challenge for strategic management. Understanding of how technology and globalization affect a company's competitive positioning and creating global competitive advantage are the most important determinants of strategic management today. European tourism is forced to respond to the pressure built by the globalisation of travel markets. Travel destinations become more and more remote while travel times become ever shorter. The developed tourism countries are consequently faced with cutthroat locational competition and forced to innovate and to lower prices. It is now widely understood in tourism locations that simply selling landscape, nature or comfortable hotel beds is no longer sufficient. [...] Some of these artificial adventure and holiday worlds, such as Disneyland or CenterParcs, have meanwhil