Supply Chain View of Tourism: A Special Reference to Education Tourism

Introduction

A traditional supply chain of goods links suppliers through procurement, fulfillment and distribution, until the end-users or customers. A supply chain framework is not easily visible and understood in a domain like education or tourism. McIntosh et al. (1995) approached with a system view to define tourism as the sum of phenomenon and relationships arising from the interaction of tourists, service providers, host governments, and host communities in the process of making the tourism products more attractive. This definition includes the potential impacts that tourists may have upon the host community including visitors such as students. The growing degree of intangibility and complexity in the tourism supply chain is attributed by the shared objectives among the interplays and services of multiple industries. Table-1 shows the graphical and descriptive illustration of the traditional supply chain for goods and services in tourism and education industry. The supply chain management framework of education system when viewed in combination with tourism should demonstrate a safe and smooth movements of educational travelers/tourists and their goods/materials in the forward direction (see Table 1, (A)) with money and information flowing reverse or backward as per the plan and schedule. In the traditional supply chain of any business, flow of goods is aligned to the market-pull with some amount of reverse flow. Usually the links of a supply chain framework become active when the host company operates its internal supply chain without substantial outsourcing. Such frameworks connect to their suppliers and customers at both ends viewing all other parties as either internal suppliers or internal customers. With the increasing competitors and needs, organizations started focusing on their core competency and outsourced the negotiable activities to third parties. Tourism being a service sector, offers convenient travel, food and accommodation desired by the tourists in a planned and scheduled manner at different destinations. Various categories of tourists originate their tours from various parts of a territory; travel by different modes, with different objectives; avail varied degree of hospitality services; travel to different destinations under different itinerary and tariff (see Table 1, (B)). However, the education supply chain is similar to a simple input-process-output model of operations management that adds suitable knowledge and skill, enabling the students to graduate to next higher level of education (see Table 1, (C)).

The modern dynamic world of business being largely driven by IT, ICT, IoT and web-based technologies, a substantial amount of transactions go crisscross. Thus the evolution of an integrated total supply chain became imperative to functions like advance payment, earning of interest and subsidy, customization of products, cancellation of order and return of damaged, inaccurately delivered or unsatisfactory goods. As the smart technologies like GPS (Global Positioning Service), GPRS (General Packet Radio Service), RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) provide a sustainable direction to the supply chains (Arora and Panda, 2018), the tourism sector need to take advantage of fully integrating similar methods for tracking, tracing and other activities. Tourism, when viewed with a supply chain perspective, seems advantageous in its service operations. Service supply chains, unlike goods supply chains, deal with the capabilities of providing pure services often associated with some products and facilities, which constitute its quality, if provided timely and effectively.