Joint service, pricing and advertising strategies with tourists’ green tourism experience in a tourism supply chain

Abstract

We consider the supply chain in the tourism industry, in which tourists are susceptible to the tourists' green tourism experience when they make purchase decisions for a green tourism product. Our research considers a green tourism supply chain (GTSC) consisting of one scenic spot (SS) and one travel agency (TA), and studies the joint green tourism service, pricing and advertising problem of the SS and the TA. We establish Stackelberg differential game models between the SS and the TA in the centralized, decentralized and revenue-sharing scenarios, and apply Pontryagin's maximum principle to obtain the dynamic equilibrium solutions of the GTSC members. Based on the three different scenarios, we analyze influences of the tourists' green tourism experience concern level, the wholesale ticket price and the sharing ratio on the optimal decisions and performances of the GTSC. This paper is the first quantitative research to study the green tourism service effort, pricing and advertising strategies of the GTSC members and design GTSC improvement contract with considering the green tourism experience. Our results provide management insights for the SS and the TA to manage GTSC under the green tourism preferences and the green tourism experience of tourists.