We study two approaches to the optimal provision of guided tours to tourists by a firm during the slack season. In the "scheduling by numbers" approach, our firm focuses on the number of tourists who must be in our firm's premises before this firm begins to use the tour guide to provide tours to...

We discuss an approach to modeling the slack season provision of guided tours to tourists that accounts for the twin phenomena of stochastic demand and tourist heterogeneity but is different from the way in which this problem has been modeled in the extant tourism literature. Our discussion uses...

In this note, we provide answers to two hitherto unstudied questions in the tourism literature. Specifically, we first show how the theory of discrete-time Markov Chains (DTMCs) can be used to effectively model and analyze the problem of providing guided tours to tourists during the off-peak...

We discuss an approach to modeling the slack season provision of guided tours to tourists that accounts for the twin phenomena of stochastic demand and tourist heterogeneity but is different from the way in which this problem has been modeled in the extant tourism literature. Our discussion uses...

In this note, we study a guided tour providing firm that operates in a stochastic environment. The environment is stochastic because this firm's costs are deterministic but its revenues are stochastic. Since revenues are stochastic, the profits of this firm are also stochastic. For such a firm,...

Alao and Batabyal (2013) have recently used contract theory to study the sale of package tours to tourists when the tourists can be of two possible types. In this note, we first generalize their analysis by studying the case in which the tourists can be of infinitely many types. Next, we compare...

We provide the first contract-theoretic analysis of how best to sell package tours to heterogeneous tourists in an environment with asymmetrically held information. Our analysis has three practical implications. First, asymmetric information tends to hamper package tour sales. Second, some...

How does the phenomenon of preference matching by tourists affect their choice between two possible destinations? We study this question. It costs less (more) to vacation in destination A (B). Tourists choose to either vacation in A or B. They differ in their incomes. These incomes are uniformly...

The clean-up of the Ganges now appears to have a champion in the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Modi contested the 2014 election from Varanasi and he has promised to convert Varanasi into a vibrant city for tourists by launching a major campaign to clean the Ganges. Despite the salience of...

Despite the salience of Mr. Narendra Modi's campaign from both environmental and touristic standpoints, the extant literature contains no theoretical studies of the clean-up of the Ganges and its connection to tourism. Hence, we use a simple model and provide the first stochastic analysis of the...