Dissertation (Masters of Business Administration)
Tourism industry in Tanzania continues to draw attention from various stakeholders. Different tour operator companies applied different pricing strategies to ensure their good performance. This study aimed to examine the pricing strategies used by tour operator companies in Tanzania and how these strategies influence their performances. A total number of 121tour operator companies in Arusha city were involved in this study. The descriptive research design which is cross sectional was used and semi structured questionnaires tools were used. The results revealed that tour operator companies in Tanzania use Odd even pricing strategies mostly. Location pricing strategies though was not as popular as other pricing strategies; cost plus pricing and competition based pricing were also applied though not much used. On the influence of pricing strategies on performance, it is found that many pricing strategies have positive correlation with performance of tour operator companies in different performance variables namely profit, Return on Asset (ROA) and Return on Investment (ROI) and contribute significantly to performance. It’s only few strategies that have negative correlation with performance of tour operators, and these prestige pricing, leader pricing and segment pricing. Time pricing, odd even pricing, discount pricing, special event pricing, penetration pricing and market price skimming have been proved to be statistically significant at 0.05 level of significance. The study concludes that companies have to weigh their situations and address their pricing objectives with several pricing strategies as they can influence performance of their companies. Study recommends that tour operators should continue to employ the strategies proved to significant in this study and effective pricing decisions by tour operators so as to keep on increasing performance.