The Role of Travel Agencies and its Positive Influence

Question: Evaluate the role of travel agencies and its positive influence on the tourism industry of the Gold Coast city. Answer: Problem Statement and Research Objectives The problem statement of this research repost is to evaluate the role of travel agencies and its positive influence on the tourism industry of the Gold Coast city. The objectives of this research report have been outlined as follows: To identify the contribution of travel agencies to attract more visitors towards the Gold Coast tourism To assess the factors influencing the tourist visit ratio towards the Gold Coast city. Research Design According to Creswell (2003), research design has been defined as a complete plan of the research work selected by the researcher for incorporation of the various aspects in a consistent and rational manner. Basically research design is summarizing the manner in which the research will carried out. This research will be based on the exploratory research design. Exploratory research examines the relationship between the variables in the research question and further provides the hypothesis for the research. In this research, the exploratory research design will facilitate in recognizing and establishing the relation between two variables which are the role played by the travel agency and its influence on the tourism industry of Gold Coast city. Thus, exploratory research design is chosen as it provides an increased understanding of how the travel agencies affect the tourism industry of the Gold Coast city and it also facilitates in answering the research questions about how the travel agencies contribute towards attracting more tourists in the Gold Coast city as well as evaluating the factors which influence the tourist visit ratio towards the Gold Coast city. Also, the research is an applied research as the research has been conducted in order to find the answers to the research question which is related to understanding the influence of the role played by the travel agencies on the tourism industry of the Gold Coast city. The applied research will facilitate in attaining the research objectives through transparency in the methodology to be chosen by the researcher. Applied research will help in understanding the significance of the travel agencies in attracting more tourists towards the Gold Coast city. It has been considered as the best form of research for academic purposes which are the reason the researcher has chosen applied research. Under this research design, various research methods such as are qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods can be chosen (Muijis, 2010). The researcher has opted for quantitative research method research method. This research requires an understanding of the factors that influence the tourists. Once the influencing factors have been understood through the literature review, it is also important to get statistical data to understand the relevance of each factor. Thus, this research also requires quantitative information. Thus, quantitative research method has been selected. This research is mainly based on the survey conducted on the tourists of Gold Coast tourists. Data collection methods There are two methods of data collection which are primary data collection and secondary data collection. Primary data is the fresh data collected for the first time by the researcher. The secondary data is the already collected data from other researchers which is accumulated by the researcher for the purpose of attainment of the research objectives (Vogt, 2010). In this research, the research will opt for both primary data collection as well as secondary data collection. The secondary data for this research is essential to identify the factors which influence the tourism industry of the Gold Coast city with special reference towards the role played by the travel agencies. The theoretical aspects of the research can be obtained through secondary data collection techniques. The secondary data for this research will be collected through various websites, journals, books and other documents published by other researchers who have conducted research on the topic. This information collected by the researcher will form the literature review section of the research paper. The primary data for this research will be collected through the Qualtrics survey. The researcher has opted for data collection through survey method as it can be easily administered and is time saving and cost efficient when compared with other methods of data collection. As it is an online survey, the geographical limitations do not matter. It is most suitable for the current research as the respondents can be asked numerous questions on the topic and a broad range of data can be collected in a short span of time (Johnson and Christensen, 2010). Thus the researcher has chosen survey method rather than interview methods. The survey will be conducted through prepared questionnaires. The questionnaires will be mailed to the tourists who visit the Gold Coast city through various travel agencies. Their email ids were obtained from the travel agencies in the city. Though there are numerous tourists who visit the city only 75 email ids were collected from the agents and the first fifty re sponses were counted for the survey. The survey will be conducted on the tourists who will be touring the Gold Coast city. The tourists will be requested to answer the questions of the prepared questionnaire which will include questions related to the various factors of the tourism industry in Gold Coast city and the role of travel agencies. The questionnaire will include both open ended as well as close ended question to achieve a better understanding of the topic and for the successful accomplishment of the research. Qualtrics Survey Qualtrics is research software which facilitates the user to conduct online surveys on various topics such as marketing, customer loyalty, customer satisfaction, market testing and many more topics (Qualtrics, 2016). For this research, the researcher will conduct online survey using the Qualtrics as the main source of primary data for the research. The questionnaire will include 7 close ended questions where the respondents are required to answer multiple choice questions. The questionnaire also includes 7 open ended questions where the respondents are asked to provide their personal views related to the role of travel agencies of Gold Coast. Sample Selection The research sampling techniques are basically of two types which are probability sampling and non-probability sampling (Bolger and Laurenceau, 2013). The researcher will choose non-probability sampling for this research as the tourists of Gold Coast city in particular are considered as respondents rather than any random individual. There are numerous people who visit the Gold Coast city each day and it is impossible to conduct survey on all the tourists. For the purpose of this research, the questionnaire will be mailed to about 75 respondents and the first 50 responses will be considered as survey samples. Ethical Considerations Research ethics refer to the moral of conduct, planning and covering the research. Research ethics focus more on the evaluation of moral issues that arise when there are individuals who participate in the research (Smith Iltis, 2006). The research ethics will be given due importance in this research for the successful accomplishment of the research. The privacy of the identity of the respondents will be kept up as they have provided their personal views. Moreover, the respondents will be requested to voluntarily participate in the research and they will be informed that they can withdraw anytime. The researcher will assure that the information collected will be used only for academic purposes. Any offensive questions will not be included in the questionnaire and the issue of academic plagiarism will be avoided. All the sources of secondary data collected will be cited properly. Data Analysis Techniques Data analysis refers to the procedure of methodically implementing logical or statistical data method to explain, demonstrate, summarize and evaluate the data collected (Govaert, 2009). The primary data will be analyzed using the SPSS software. For this purpose, the data will be processed by using tabular representation of the data. Then the processed data will be cleaned of errors and duplications. Later, the data will be cross validated to enhance its correctness and credibility. The qualitative data collected will be analyzed through coding and decoding. Also, the variables will be correlated in order to understand the dependent and the independent variable which refers to the correlation statistical test. This is done through the bivariate associations. Furthermore, paired T-test will be conducted. Also, the sensitivity analysis will be done in order to assure the stability of the results obtained through the research. Moreover, the data quality will be frequently checked through the process of the research to provide the best quality of data to attain the objectives of the research. Once the data is analyzed, it will be reported for feedback and again changes will be made accordingly. References Bolger, N. and Laurenceau, J. (2013).Intensive longitudinal methods. New York, NY: Guilford Press. Creswell, J. (2003).Research design. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications. Govaert, G. (2009).Data analysis. London: ISTE. Johnson, B. and Christensen, L. (2010) Educational Research: Quantitative, Qualitative, and Mixed Approaches. UK: SAGE. Muijis, D. (2010). Doing Quantitative Research in Education with SPSS. SAGE. Qualtrics. (2016).The World's Leading Research Insights Platform | Qualtrics. [online] Available at: https://www.qualtrics.com/ [Accessed 24 May 2016]. Smith Iltis, A. (2006).Research ethics. New York: Routledge. Vogt, W. (2010).Data collection. Los Angeles: SAGE.