EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Dual-channel ticketing and pricing strategies in cruise revenue management

Kaimin Chen, Shuai Jia, Jing Wang, Dong Yang and Yi Ding

Maritime Policy & Management, 2024, vol. 51, issue 5, 781-804

Abstract: To address cruise companies’ revenue loss caused by over-reliance on indirect channels for ticket distribution, we design a dual-channel pricing policy that includes dynamic horizontal and vertical pricing regimes aiming to maximizing cruise companies’ revenue. In the horizontal pricing regime, cruise companies and travel agencies offer uniform prices to consumers dynamically. In the vertical pricing regime, cruise companies provide dynamic commissions to travel agencies based on their sales performances. In view of the dynamic customer arrivals and uncertain demand, we model the dynamic dual-channel pricing decisions as a Markov decision process, and solve the model by means of a reinforcement learning method. Our computational results show that dual-channel pricing policies generated by our method outperform the classic Expected Marginal Seat Revenue method, which has been widely used in similar industries such as airlines for revenue management. In addition to the various features of dual-channel in ticket distribution, our model also takes into account customers’ onboard consumptions, which is a critical source of revenue in cruise industry but has never been considered in the literature. As a result, our model and computational results provide insightful implications for cruise revenue management.

Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/03088839.2023.2224376 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:marpmg:v:51:y:2024:i:5:p:781-804

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/TMPM20

DOI: 10.1080/03088839.2023.2224376

Access Statistics for this article

Maritime Policy & Management is currently edited by Dr Kevin Li and Heather Leggate McLaughlin

More articles in Maritime Policy & Management from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-20
Handle: RePEc:taf:marpmg:v:51:y:2024:i:5:p:781-804