The Travel Agent: Delivering More Value by Becoming an Operational Risk Manager

Debely, Joëlle; Dubosson, Magali; Fragnière, Emmanuel

doi:10.2139/ssrn.987981

Cited by 12 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 64 publications

(54 reference statements)

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“…It was not until recently that services came to be regarded not only as an accompaniment to the sale of products but as a way of externalizing the risk of certain kinds of choice on the basis of expertise (Debely et al 2007). The production of highly customized, expertise-driven services was viewed as an impediment to efficiency and effectiveness, and prone to excessive variance in quality and delivery.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Performing Service Design Experiments Using Ethnomethodology and Theatre-Based Reenactment: A Swiss Ski Resort Case Study

2012

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A service experience corresponds to a social process whose "production" involves both a provider and a client. This production process that leads to a problem resolution does not follow a linear sequence, as in the case of industrialized organizations. Through ethnomethodology, we are able to "tangibilize" the social codes and systems of beliefs that drive the service experience. Then, through scriptwriting and role plays, we redesign, safeguard (risk management), price, and test the new service. After three years of applying this approach in our service lab, hundreds of students have been introduced to the process of ethnomethodology and have designed their own services. To illustrate the approach, we present in this paper a service design that we have implemented for the tourist information service of Crans-Montana, Switzerland.

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Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Performing Service Design Experiments Using Ethnomethodology and Theatre-Based Reenactment: A Swiss Ski Resort Case Study

2012

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“…Limiting the number of mistakes to the strict minimum is essential. This notion of operational efficiency is thus intimately linked to operational risk management [14,6]. It is related to people's knowledge and skills.…”

Section: Revising Operation Efficiency Probability Distributionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Operations risk management by optimally planning the qualified workforce capacity

Fragnière¹,

Gondzio

Yang

2010

European Journal of Operational Research

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Operational risks are defined as risks of human origin. Unlike financial risks that can be handled in a financial manner (e.g. insurances, savings, derivatives), the treatment of operational risks calls for a "managerial approach". Consequently, we propose a new way of dealing with operational risk, which relies on the well known aggregate planning model.To illustrate this idea, we have adapted this model to the case of a back office of a bank specializing in the trading of derivative products. Our contribution corresponds to several improvements applied to stochastic programming techniques. First, the model is transformed into a multistage stochastic program in order to take into account the randomness associated with the volume of transaction demand and with the capacity of work provided by qualified and non-qualified employees over the planning horizon. Second, as advocated by Basel II, we calculate the probability distribution based on a Bayesian Network to circumvent the difficulty of obtaining data which characterizes uncertainty in operations. Third, we go a step further by relaxing the traditional assumption in stochastic programming that imposes a strict independence between the decision variables and the random elements. Comparative results show that in general these improved stochastic programming models tend to allocate more human expertise in order to hedge operational risks. Finally, we employ the dual solutions of the stochastic programs to detect periods and nodes that are at risk in terms of the expertise availability.

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“…The travel agent's job then becomes a knowledgebased service of high added value [2]. A knowledgebased service can be described as a service delivered by highly trained providers that offer a high quality service designed to meet the customers' needs [13]. This definition seems to fit well to the job of the traditional travel agent work that deals with understanding the customers' requirements and providing them with high-added value services [10].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In addition to these losses, 2005 data highlight that only one third of overall travel bookings were made through traditional travel agencies [13,18]. This trend has been confirmed in 2006, with "more than one fourth of Swiss making reservations for their holidays through the Internet that equals the traditional travel agencies" [19].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pricing Traditional Travel Agency Services: A Theatre-Based Experimental Study

Catenazzo¹,

Fragnière²

2010

JSSM

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Airline commissions’ cuts and the use of Internet for bookings have severely affected traditional (physical) travel agencies. To survive, travel agents are redesigning their job as to become travel consultants. However, customers seem not to be willing to pay for the service provided and current fees are not representative of its perceived value. We have designed a theatre-based experiment to discover the Willingness-To-Pay for a travel agency service experience. Results show that individuals are not willing to pay anything for an unpleasant experience. By contrast, only 1/3 of the sample would pay enough for an outstanding service experience to make such a business sustainable

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The Travel Agent: Delivering More Value by Becoming an Operational Risk Manager

Cited by 12 publications

References 64 publications

Performing Service Design Experiments Using Ethnomethodology and Theatre-Based Reenactment: A Swiss Ski Resort Case Study

Performing Service Design Experiments Using Ethnomethodology and Theatre-Based Reenactment: A Swiss Ski Resort Case Study

Operations risk management by optimally planning the qualified workforce capacity

Pricing Traditional Travel Agency Services: A Theatre-Based Experimental Study

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