Question

As the manager of XYZ City Tours, you are responsible for making sure the 10 daily tour buses are filled. But lately (perhaps due to the overly hot summer season), each of your 10 buses has been touring the city half empty. You remember your HFT 3700 class in which you learned that products and services can not be marketed the same way. You realize that the _______ nature of the service you’re marketing requires you to better balance supply and demand.

Answer 1

perishable

Step-by-step explanation:

The four main characteristics of services are:

1. Intangibility: you cannot touch, feel or see services
2. Inseparability: services are provided and consumed at the same time
3. Perishability: if a service is not sold today, it cannot be stored in order to be sold tomorrow, e.g. a hotel has 100 rooms and 20 are empty today, the hotel will not have 10 rooms tomorrow, it will still have 100 rooms.
4. Variability: the quality of a service may vary, since services depend a lot on human performance

Since hot weather is causing the demand for city tours to decrease, you must find a way to decrease your supply in order to fill the tour buses. No one can change hot weather, so you need a contingency plan for extremely hot days.

Answer 2

perishable

Step-by-step explanation:

Based on the information provided is can be said that the perishable nature of the service is what makes you need to market it better. The hot weather seems to cause a quick decay in demand for your buses. This being the case a different marketing technique would need to be used in order to convince people that taking the tour bus on a hot day is a good idea, or instead cut down your supply by reducing the number of buses in half in order to maintain balance with your demand.