Company Description
Indiana Beach Resort
This is a leisure based company whose mission statement is to be the best beach resort in the whole world. The resort will be based in the north Sumatra province of Indonesia along the Sumatra Island.
The main route of accessing the island will be a company based boat that will transport our clients from the mainland to the island for a distance covering approximately 8kms from the mainland (World guides 2011).
The main services and products to be offered in the resort include: spar services, restaurant, play ground for children and outdoor facilities such as a swimming pool interlinked to the Indian Ocean and lodges for tourists who are interested with spending a night in the serine environment.
Further, the resort will include a designated area for camping with 24 hours security personnel manning the camping area for purposes of protecting our clients who are keen on spending their nights outdoors. However, tourists will be required to come with their camping facilities such as tents and sleeping bags.
Located in the Sumatra Island, the resort will be among the first tourism destination in the island to offer relaxing services to the tourists who visit the area throughout the year. Therefore the main target for the resort includes tourists from all over the world who visit tourist’s destinations such as Lake Toba, Mount Krakatoa, Sumatra museums among other tourist destinations (World guides 2011).
The mentioned facilities provide more vigorous tourism activities such as swimming and mountain climbing and thus overlooking the more relaxing tourism activities such as camping, dinning, sun bathing among others. To meet the relaxing needs of the tourists, it is important to come up with serine environments that offer a calm mood.
Therefore, the resorts mandate is to provide the most serine, quite and relaxing environment for tourists to be able to enjoy the cool breeze of the ocean.
Market Environment
The tourism market in Indonesia is among the major contributors to the economy of the country after the extensive agriculture industry. The country is a tourist destination to variety of tourists with different tourist needs.
Tourists visit the country mainly due to its monuments, historical sites geographical features and the cultural practices of the different primitive Indonesian tribes situated in the rural parts of the country. Wildlife is also among the major attractions in the country though the sector is still under developed in terms of access routes to the wildlife designated areas.
However, in the northern part of Indonesia, tourism numbers and trends are quite low due to poor infrastructure and emergence of separations among the province residents (Boniface and Cooper 2009). This however notwithstanding, there is great potential for tourism activities especially resorts adjacent to Mount Krakatoa which is a volcanic mountain and a major attraction sites for tourists who come all the way to capture the eruptions up close (Erfurt and Cooper 2010).
Further, primitive tribes culture is one of the major tourist’s interests in the island thus marketing the island and as a result contributing to the number of tourists visiting the area (Eliot and Bickersteth 2000).
Further, there is a huge market potential for Indiana Resort considering that there are very few guest houses in the Island to cater for the tourists visiting the island and other adjacent tourism destination in Sumatra Island.
In addition, the housing facilities available are unsuitable for tourists (Connell and Rugendyke 2008). This therefore, necessitates the need to maximize on the availability of tourists and lack of resources to cater for tourism services. Hence, improving the market stance of the resort.
Lack of facilities also implies that there is minimum competition of beach resorts within the island.
This therefore means that out of the more than 5000 guests who visit the island annually, Indiana Resort is destined to cater for up to 80 % of the tourists relaxing and accommodation needs and an additional almost equivalent number of tourists in form of local tourist guides from the mainland who normally accompany their tourists throughout their visitation period within the island (Causey 2003).
Management Plan
According to Schwalbe (2006), a management plan includes systematic planning, definition and control of the main tasks that will help an enterprise to achieve the overall mandate of the business. This therefore includes all the tasks that should be handled and a detailed description of how the management team intends to organize all the factors to assimilate a working plan that is in line with the mandate of the company.
Kerzner (2009) further argues that a good project should come up with a plan that highlights the scope of the business, the required resources, expected schedule and quality.
The management plan of Indiana Resort will include two on sight managers with four departments (spar, outdoor recreation, restaurant and lodges). The plan will follow porters Differentiation Strategy which emphasizes on offering facilities and services that are different from the competitors, in this case, the relaxing facilities and camping sites (Griffin 2008).
The scope of the resort is to meet the relaxing needs of 20-50 tourists per day. This will be managed through advanced bookings which will act as a cushion for the company in order to properly manage the number of people visiting the resort in a professional manner without delays (Chen andSchwartz 2008)
Some of the requirements for commencing of this business include the initial capital for purchasing the land, construction of facilities and the initial supply of materials. This will be managed through collection of capital from all the stake holders and borrowing from financial institutions.
To manage the schedule of the resort, it will be vital to come up with a schedule chart which highlights all the departments within the resort, their respective activities and the staff members in charge of coordinating and undertaking all the activities.
To further maintain high standards of quality in terms of service delivery, it is vital that we outsource hospitality training for all the staff members and maintain continuous supervision of services rendered through client’s surveys to be conducted quarterly.
Operations Plan
Timmons, Zacharakis and Spinelli (2004) define operations plan as the production cycle and the delivery tactics of a given business arranged in a systematic manner in the order of occurrence. Thomas and Derammelaere (2008) argue that such a plan should be centred on ensuring a superior competitive advantage over rivals and maximising on offering quality services to the consumers.
They further assert that the nature of the operations plan determines the rate at which a given company will actualize its mandate
Indiana Beach Resort operation strategy will be centred on ensuring quality services for our clients. For the restaurant department, the operations plan will involve outsourcing for food suppliers from the farmers in the main land and seafood from the island. This will also include the inclusion of professional chefs who will cater for the food orders issued by tourists visiting the resort.
For the spar department, the operations will include previous bookings by clients for specific services. Further, our spar will include well trained professional spar attendants who maximise on exclusive spar treatment such as massaging using Indonesian herbs and oils.
For the outside recreation department, our outdoor services will include offering relaxing terraces, benches and seats around the swimming pool and accompanying tables that can be utilized by tourists willing to dine outside. Previous bookings will not be necessary.
However, the staff members of this department will always be ready to meet any outside recreation services such as orienting the tourists around the resort and identifying features visible from the resorts view point.
The lodges department will cater for all the sleeping facilities by maintaining the lodges. These department’s operations will also include making sure that the clients dinning arrangements and visitation arrangements are attended to on a daily basis.
The operations hours will be 24 hours with our workers working for 8 hours shifts. This means that there will be three shifts per department with approximately 12 attendants per shift. The core goal of all the departments will be to maintain a low cost operations strategy that will deliver quality services to our clients (Waters 1990).
Financial Plan
The financial plan for Indiana Beach Resort covers expenses from the establishment of the resort to the first three months after the launch of the resort in US $.
Contingency Plan
Rothstein (2007) asserts that a contingency plan is the equivalent of a disaster management tool which highlight he necessary steps to be undertaken in case the project fails due to varying reasons. Therefore the plan should focus on anticipated challenges and their resolutions (Childs and Dietrich 2002).
For Indiana Resort, in case of a delay of funds to commence the business, it will be necessary that the company starts with a few departments maybe one or two or launch one department at a time depending with the availability of funds and the requirements for each face of the business plan.
In cases where the tourism season is off peak, which is a very common occurrence in the tourism sector, it will be appropriate to lay off some workers in order to reduce on the company’s expenditure until the tourism season peaks.
In case the company has to do away with some departments during the off-peak season, I recommend that the company website should be updated in order to avoid inconveniencing travelers booking for services that the company cannot avail at a specific season.
Reference List
Boniface, B. and Cooper, C., 2009. Worldwide Destinations: The Geography of Travel and Tourism. 5th ed. Boston: Elsevier.
Causey, A., 2003. Hard bargaining in Sumatra: western travelers and Toba Bataks in the market place for souvenirs. Hawaii: University of Hawaii press.
Chen, C. and Schwartz, Z., 2008. Timing Matters: Travelers’ Advanced-Booking Expectations and Decisions. Journal of Travel Research, 47(1), pp. 35-42.
Childs, D.R. and Dietrich, S., 2002. Contingency planning and disaster recovery: a small business guide. New Jersey: Wiley.
Connell, J. and Rugendyke, B., 2008. Tourism at the grassroots: villagers and visitors in the Asia-Pacific. New York: Routledge.
Eliot, J. and Bickersteth, J., 2000. Sumatra Handbook., Columbia: Footprint Publishers.
Erfurt, P.C. and Cooper, M., eds. 2010. Volcano and Geothermal Tourism: Sustainable Geo-Resources for Leisure and Recreation. London: Earthscan.
Griffin, R.W., 2008. Management. Boston: Mifflin Company.
Kerzner, H., 2009. Project Management: A Systems Approach to Planning, Scheduling, and Controlling. New Jersey: Wiley.
Rothstein, P.J., 2007. Disaster Recovery Testing: Exercising Your Contingency Plan. London: Rothstein associates.
Schwalbe, K., 2006. Introduction to project management. Boston: Thomson Learning.
Thomas, D. and Derammelaere, S.A., 2008. Writing a Convincing Business Plan. New York: Barron’s Educational Series.
Timmons, J., Zacharakis, A. and Spinelli, S., 2004. Business plans that work: a guide for small business. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Waters, C., 1990. Operations management. London: Kogan Limited.
World guides, 2011. Sumatra Tourist Information and Sumatra Tourism, (Online) Available at <http://www.world-guides.com/asia/indonesia/sumatra/>.