engleski

Τhe competitive pricing in marina business: exploring relative price position and price fluctuation

The purpose: Competitive pricing is considered to be a very important part of revenue management, a management instrument that enables selling right products and services to the customers at the prices that will produce highest revenues. Marina business is supposedto be a business whose products or services are perishable (similar to hotels, airlines, campsites, hostels etc.) and tracking the prices of competitors is very important part of managing its business.The purpose of this paper is to address the problem of relative price position and relative price fluctuation performance in marina business and seeks to complement existing research in the domain of strategic price positioning. Design/methodology: The 32 Croatian marinas delivered monthly financial and non-financial information through the Marina Benchmarking project databaseoverthe period of 36 months (2015 - 2017).Based on the similar research conducted for hotels, this study explores the relationship between pricing strategy and marinas position in ABR, RevPAB and berth occupancy in relation to their competitive sets. Variables used are ABR, RevPAB and berth occupancy percentage differences. For each marina indicator, the percentage differences were calculated by dividing each individual marina indicator with the average indicator of their competitive set. Marinas were divided into 10 different pricing categories that ranged from 0 to 30 percent. A regression analysis was performed for the given period and research results presented. Findings:The research results revealthat marinas who set their prices higher than their competition achieve lower level of berth occupancy and at the same time succeed higher RevPAB. Marinas with lower prices than their competitors achieve higher level of berth occupancy and lower RevPAB. Originality of the research: Similar studies regarding price positioning have so far been conducted on hotel business. This research is the first study on competitive pricing thah has been conducted for marina business and it shows the importance of price positioning ans well as its contribution to successful managing of business performance in marinas.

marina performance ; revenue management ; revenue per available berth (RevPAB) ; competitive pricing ; price position of berth ; price fluctuation of berth ; berth occupancy

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