Al Tayyar Travel Group-role in transforming Saudi tourism

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Table of Contents

Introduction and Overview of services offered.
Partnership with government
Challenges and mitigation.
Strategies and successes.
Conclusion
Works Cited

Introduction and Overview of services offered.

Al-Tayya Travel Group is a limited company which has its origin from, and operations centralized in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The company also has interests abroad. The specialization of the company is in planning and designing of tourism trips as well as itineraries (Bloomberg Business week 1). The company offers reservations tickets for customers on many backgrounds. For those travelling by the sea, the company is ready to make them bookings for their stay upon disembarking from the sea trip.

Those travelling by air also receive this service. For those on land, there are many reservation and related services offered (Hertog 204). They include car rental where the company helps them obtain transportation to the different destination they would desire upon disembarking from their vessels of travel. Besides the car rentals services, the company also offers tourists, services of external hotel reservations. They help the tourists get their bookings to hotels which fit their descriptions (Bloomberg Business week 1).

This service enables the tourists, not only to get access to the best in the hotel service sector but also to match other issues such as their financial base. While servicing as a middle ground on these, the company has developed a wide connection with many travel agencies as well as hotels in the country and the region to which it books the clients or to sea, air as well as land.

The above are not the only services which are offered by the company. Besides the above, the company also offers airport schedule transfers. This activity is wholly done by the company through online messaging upon request for such by the customers who wishes to make flight reschedules. For the company, this is achieved through the customer advancing the details which he or she intends to be passed to the flight operators as reasons for this change.

Serving as a middle ground in the communication, the company gets paid for enabling the two to converse and the customer to have satisfaction of travelling at his or her convenience. The above aside, the company is also engaged in helping tourists with their cargo issues. In this, the company helps such individuals in their clearing of cargo at custom points (Bloomberg Business week 2). To enable this, the company has staff that operates to bridge the services of cargo handling with the necessary officials.

They help such get the permits for transit of cargo at these points. For the tourist with large cargo, this whole process of cargo handling can be done by the company without their presence as long as the customer sends the details. This way, the company has helped many people ensure the safety of their cargo and their reach to their desired destinations many days before they make their own trips to transact or visit places.

The company has been framed to absorb many of services relating to the needs of tourists. At the center of the company, are staffs employed to engage in different activities. Besides the above staff, the company also has staff to provide security to the tourists if they desire to take them on.

The persons employed by the company as bodyguards for hire are enough and each tourist would easily get the number that he or she desires (Bloomberg Business week 2). The bodyguards taken on for his duty are individuals who are employees of respected security companies in the country.

They are those who have distinguished themselves in their service as trustworthy, efficient and effective. These credentials are usually analyzed before such are taken on for the jobs. With such professionalism, some tourists indeed depend on the company for this sole service of sourcing their security detail while they are on their touring ventures.

At the heart of the services being offered by the company, there is identification that the bigger portion of the customer base is in the country thus a population of Arabic speakers.

The company too realizes that the Asian continent especially the Arabic-speaking counties form the most important base from which the tourists come. To this end, the company has invested a lot in having many employees competent and fluent in Arabic offer services to the large portion of the clients who would prefer being addressed in this language (Bloomberg Business week 3).

Today, the company’s staff meets the demand from clients in relation to language of communication not only because of this emphasis on Arabic but because of the culture of language teaching and learning which has been developed. In the company, employees are required to attend language lessons in the company’s academy. Here they are taught different languages which ensure that they are able to meet the language demands of all clients.

The number of services offered by the company is insurmountable. They also include postal services. I this, the company helps those traveling to be able to communicate or correspond with various authorities or relations they would be visiting or making contact with. The framing of the postal services also helps the tourists to send messages across the country from the different locations they are in.

The company, in ensuring the success of this, has allocated transit vehicles among other tools, to ensure that the letters sent by the customers across the different locations are reaching their destinations promptly. Besides the postal services, the company also engages in making conference venue arrangements upon the request for this service by customers (Bloomberg Business week 1).

In this, the company allocates conferencing hall as well as facilities including communication and utility facilities. Besides the conferencing facilities, the company also offers some recreational activities. Some of these which are offered by the company include yatch ad sea cruises. These are available to customers already using the services for which the company engages in. They are bonus services for those for example using the conference facilities of the company.

Partnership with government

In the history of the Al Tayyar Travel Group, its founder, Dr. Nasser Bin Akeel Al-Tayyar will always stand tall. The beginning of this group is traced to the goodwill of prince Salman Bin Abdul Aziz. In the beginning of the company, there were only six people as staff. But things have changes much.

By the year 2007, the company already had thousands of employees. It had expanded from this humble beginning at Riyadh to have more than 200 branches throughout the country. Besides those in the country, the company had also nine branches abroad by this year (Business and Finance club 2).

According to the founder, there is much to talk about the company now. Many of these are explicitly telling by themselves. As an example, the company is rated as one of the biggest companies in the country in overall rankings of companies. It ranks among the topmost in asset base in terms of service companies (Business and Finance club 3).

According to the founder, the company is the great company it is today because it has remained committed to its important business which is to take the tourism business in the country to the next level (Business and Finance club 3). Indeed the company has been hailed as the pioneer of tourism services in the country. Because of the coordination between the prince and the founder of the company, tourism had grown in the last twenty years of the country.

As the founder identifies, when the company was breeding, there was identification that though the country was richly possessed with vast tourist attractions, there was lack of strategy to exploit it. As Dr. Nasser Bin Akeel Al-Tayyar identifies, taking the step into the unknown, the company became the only one which was venturing into the sector of tourism and in opening up the country to international tourism.

This foundation as the first company in tourism service has been its important asset because it stays ahead of the park in relation to understanding the real issues. As Dr. Nasser Bin Akeel Al-Tayyar identifies, the trying in the end bore fruits. Thanks to the company, the country now boosts of numerous tourism destinations which are always completely filled to capacity with both local and international tourists.

As Dr. Nasser Bin Akeel Al-Tayyar states, the prince has always been at the heart of all these. His commitment to developing tourism especially through the many tourist projects that he puts forth has indeed been very important. The company has always watched every opportunity being opened by the prince.

As an example in the recent time, there was an intended project by the prince of opening up the Arkah area as a tourist destination. Sensing this to be an important venture for the future, the company moved to study the details of the case. This project was promising to be an important one because of the success of the Champs Elise which had become great tourism destination in the country.

Being only a few miles from this place, the Arkah area was promising. In the end, this project has bored frits and both the prince and the company are happy from what has been achieved. Today, the cooperation of the two (prince and Al Tayyar Travel Group) has ensured that the place is the best destination for those wishing to engage in all kinds of hobbies. The place has, for example, been framed to make possible walking ventures through the expanse.

Basing on this cooperation such as in the above project, the group has in the end remained so linked with the government. Throughout the history of the company, it has been receiving government social as well as financial support. For the government, it is always true that the intention of the company is not strictly profit but also to strengthen the whole of the tourist sector of the country.

Using the coordination with the government, the Al Tayyar Travel Group has not disappointed (Walker 205). The belief of the Al Tayyar Travel Group which has formed the basis of the cooperation is that the tourism sector can also be made into becoming one of the greatest sectors depended on by the economy.

The view of the company is not specifically to make profit but also to help the government and country diversify the sources of revenue. It is to make the country to expand it resource from the overdependence on oil to have tourism also bringing in the benefits in such volumes.

Challenges and mitigation.

The view of the company has always been that there are not enough infrastructures for the country to fully exploit the tourism potential she has. The belief by the company is that the ball has however started rolling and there is need for important players to be aggressively engaged. The vision of the company is to have the tourism sector in Saudi Arabia equaling the framings in countries such as Spain, France, Egypt, Dubai and Germany.

The company sees many things as needing to be done. Modernization of the existing infrastructures in the tourism sector is one of the greatest concerns of the company. As the company collaborates with other players, it has identified that there is need for all players to ensure upgrade of the existing systems to match them to those possessed by the countries already high in the competition (Business and Finance club 4).

For Al Tayyar Travel Group, the mission is to use the human skills possessed as well as the material and financial resources at disposal to ensure that the transformations in the infrastructure of the tourism sector in the country is happening as fast as possible.

Besides the modernization of structures and infrastructure, the Al Tayyar Travel Group also identifies the legal structures as another objective to be taken on. As the company believes, the country still lacks enough legal guidelines to guide the practice and thus make it beneficial to all players. In relation to the legal infrastructure, the company identifies the lack of a tourist authority in the country for so long. However, working with the government the company has ensured that the creation of this is on track.

Strategies and successes.

Competency is the driving force of the company. To this end, it has invested a lot in its human resource training. The company realizes that taking the country’s tourism sector to the next level is indeed the way forward in making sure that benefits flow to everyone. At the same time, the company realizes that this cannot be a possibility if the country still lacked the human capacity to drive the tourism sector.

To achieve this dream of transforming tourism, the company, besides its important objective of offering tourism services, has also established an academy for training of individuals in tourism and the role it can play to making individuals, companies and the country benefit.

To this end, the company has established the Al-Tayyar Training Academy. The visions for this are two fold. The first is to ensure that going forward; the company is assured of a highly trained staff. The areas emphasized on include booking staff training, tourism design training and tourism accountancy (Business and Finance club 5).

According to the mission of the company, the academy has a central role in ensuring that the services received by the customers are world-class thus cutting-edge. But to fulfill the overall objective, the company does not tie the individuals who graduate to the company. Instead, it allows them to go out and influence positively on the transformations to the tourism sector in the country to make it more enriching.

In transforming the country to a tourism economy, the company intends to carry along the objectives of equality. This is clear in the way it approaches the issue of gender balance at the workplace. From inception, the company has been harboring the dream of one day making the gender disparity in employment opportunities non-existent.

To achieve this, the company has rolled out an aggressive plan to ensure employment of women. The main focus has been to avoid aggressive competition through giving women priority in some areas in order to balance their inadequacy in representation in others.

According to the founder, this dream has been achieved through focus on having all the booking tasks thus jobs taken on by women staff as opposed to having mixed gender. As the founder identifies, this has been an important step which has paid-off by ensuring that the company is an equal opportunity employer. As the founder identifies, ticket bookings in the company is a service which is exclusively offered by women employees (Business and Finance club 5).

Besides the ticket booking, there are many other areas where the women are given focus and some leverage in order to ensure their including. Such areas also include the phone reception. According to the founder, visiting the company today, one is likely to encounter a situation where the person who is booking him or her as well as the one who received is or her phone to make the bookings is women. Besides the two, the company has also given woman presence in the many other jobs relating to entering of data.

One who visits headquarter identifies that the company is built on a data system which ensures that the customer’s needs are attended to promptly and are well coordinated. Though the technical sections are mostly held by men, the company has ensured that the majority of those in the non-technical sections of the technology process are women. This has been an important avenue in balancing the gender at the company.

For a long time, the Saudi Company had been concerned on the lack of synergy between the technological transformations happening in the country and in the continent with the connections; this can have with the tourism sector. For such a long time, the tourism sector remained secluded from many other sectors which had easily embraced technology as the way forward.

On this ground, the company has charted a path to make breakthroughs for the tourism sector. On May 4^th may of 2011, something new was happening at the company. On this date, the company was introducing the use of iPhone by customers to make their bookings through the company (Al Bawaba 1).

This strategy was being taken in collaboration with telecommunication players such as 2share as well as Amadeus. According to the the CEO’s’ message at a gala on the launch of this application, this was a strategy aimed at making the company and the country the choice for customers who wished to have the greatest satisfaction in the tourism service industry.

As the CEO identified, it was something whose time had come because with the use of technology now engraved in the Saudi society, it was imperative to avail to consumers something which would increase convenience in obtaining the services they desired (Al Bawaba 3).

The view of the company in taking this path was thus not specifically to reach benefits, but to further open-up the tourism sector and increase profits coming to it. According to the objectives set in this rolling out, the aim of this was also to continue the overall objective for making collaborations with other sectors of the economy to make the tourism sector stronger. As it was identified at the event of the launch, the iPhone mode was also to market not only the company but the sector as a whole.

Many speakers at the event lauded this move as a step for the best for the tourism service sector. According to Nashat Bukhari, Amadeus’ general manager, this step by Al Tayyar Travel Group was to be the first in the country and would help a lot not only in increasing the customer traffic but also in setting a benchmark for the rest to follow suite.

As the manger Amadeus manager identified, this was an important step in assuring the trust of the customers in the company to be the leading in providing them with a cutting edge tools to reach the objectives (Al Bawaba 4).

Conclusion

As discussed, Al Tayyar Travel Group is highly related to the transformations which have occurred and made the tourism sector in Saudi Arabia as booming as it is today. According to the discussion, the company has been at the heart of all reforms shared by the government of making the country an attraction for tourists.

According to the discussion, cultural issues such as gender disparity, infrastructure issues such as lack of recreational centers as well as competency issues have all been influenced and addressed by Al Tayyar Travel Group in the bid to transform the sector. According to the discussion, all these bore fruits and thus more benefits such as the use of technology have been taken on as the new paths.

Works Cited

Al Bawaba. Al Tayyar Travel Group launches the first mobile application for booking in the Middle East. 2011. Web.

Bloomberg Business week. Al Tayyar Travel Group. 2011. Web.

Business and Finance club. Interview with Dr, Nasser Bin Akeel Al-Tayyar, the vice chairman and managing director of Al-Tayyar Travel Group. Web.

Hertog, Steffen. Princes, Brokers, and Bureaucrats: Oil and the State in Saudi Arabia. Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 2010. Print.

Walker, Jenny. Oman, Uae & Arabian Peninsula. Footscray, Vic: Lonely Planet, 2010. Print.

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