7Ps marketing mix of comfort innIn today’s experience economy, the quality of service experience gets increasing attention from consumers (Mudie & Cottam, 2010). Hospitality is a service-oriented industry. In this case, hotels need create excellent service to consumers in order to increase consumers’ satisfaction during the marketing process. By doing so, hotels can realize competitive edge in competitive market. Comfort inn is hotel business located in 312/316 Main Rd, Ballarat, Victoria, Australia. In order to satisfy customers and intensify competitive advantage, 7Ps marketing mix is practiced by Comfort inn. ProductProduct is referred to the offers provided by businesses to customers. Normally, products many includes physical goods and intangible services. According to Kotler and Armstrong (2014), product includes three levels, including core product, actual product, and augmented product. Core product stands for the benefits that consumers can obtain by purchasing specific products or services (Kotler & Armstrong, 2014). As a hotel, the core product of Comfort inn is its accommodation services. To satisfy consumers’ wants and needs, Comfort inn is committed to create a comfortable accommodation services to its target consumers. Actual product is the physical goods that consumers can touch and see (Kotler & Armstrong, 2014). The physical goods reflect that the foundational benefits of products. To provide comfortable accommodation services to consumers, Comfort inn provides large guest rooms where are equipped with prefect accommodation facilities such as comfortable beds, TV, and laundry facilities and so on. Augmented product means additional value-added services that consumers can obtain from service providers (Kotler & Armstrong, 2014). For creating excellent service experience to consumers, Comfort inn provides free WiFi, car parking, indoor pool, and ticket booking service to consumers. By providing consumers with excellent services, Comfort inn successfully creates an outstanding service experience to consumers, and thus attracts a larger number of consumers to check in.PricePrice is defined as the total cost that consumer need to bear when purchasing specific product or service (Blythe, 2009). For attracting target consumers and competing with competitive rivals, enterprises need to adopt effective pricing strategy. In order to compete with other hotels and approach target consumers, competition-based pricing strategy is practiced by Comfort inn. According to Schindler, (2011), competition-based pricing strategy means that an enterprise uses the prices of competing product in markets as benchmark, and then set its product prices that are relatively lower than the competing products. Currently, many hotels such as Sovereign Hill Hotel, Country Comfort Ballara, Barkly Motorlodge, BEST WESTERNBakery Hill Motel, and Mercure BallaratHotel & Convention Centre etc areproviding hotel services to consumers. Inface of high competitive pressure,competition-based pricing strategy isadopted by Comfort inn to set its pricerange of its hotel services. The price ofthe hotel services provided by Comfort inn is lower than its competitors. By providing excellent hotel services with competitive prices to target consumers, Comfort inn further improves its competitive advantages and attracts more consumers to purchase its hotel services.PromotionPromotion is referred to the marketing communication campaign that an enterprise uses to promote products or brands to target consumers (Blythe, 2009). Currently, Comfort inn takes the following promotional methods to promote its hotel services to target consumers. To make target consumers to know its offers, Comfort inn uses internet and social media such as Facebook and LinkedIn as the communication tools to communicate its hotel services to target audiences. Additionally, in order to attract more consumers, price promotion also is used by Comfort inn to boost its productsales performance in competitive market. To be specific, price discount and coupons are provided by Comfort inn to its consumers. By using promotion activities, it is believed that Comfort inn can attract more consumers to purchase its hotel services and thus achieve sales growth.PlaceComfort inn has superior location advantage, which helps the hotel to approach andattract target consumers. Comfort inncloses to Sovereign Hill where has somefamous tourism attractions such as theGold Museum and Ballarat GoldfieldsHoliday Park and so on. Consumers cantake a 15-minutes walk from Comfort innto Sovereign Hill. Depending on superiorlocation advantage, Comfort inn is ableto attract target consumers to check inbecause consumers not only can obtain hotel services from Comfort inn, but also can visit some tourism attractions.PeopleIn current experience era, consumers not only pay more attention to products provided by hotels, but also service quality of hotel employees (Prapannetivuth, 2015). People are the most important elements in service marketing because services are delivered by employees to consumers (Buddhichiwin, 2015). In order to deliver the excellent customer services to consumers, Comfort inn’s employees were trained to be patient, polite, and ready for proving best customer services to customers. Employees at Comfort inn try their best to provide friendly services to consumers, and rapidly response to customers’requirement. According to Gap Model of Service Quality proposed by Parasuraman, Zeithaml and Berry in 1985, customer satisfaction is depending on the gap between perception and expectation (Shahin & Samea,2010). Once consumers perceive that specific services that consumers obtain from service providers are better than their expectations for service quality, the consumers will feel satisfied. People at Comfort inn were trained to provide the best services to consumers. By providing excellent customer services, consumers will perceived that the actual customer services provided by Comfort inn go beyond consumers’expectations for services. Consequently, consumers will have higher intention to accept hotel services provided by Comfort inn.ProcessProcess is depicted as the activities or ways of delivery products or services to consumers to consumers (Rafiq &Ahmed, 1995). In service marketing domain, process is an important link because it directly influences the quality of the delivered services. To deliver excellent service experience consumers, the hotel provide online booking services to its target consumers. Under this condition, consumers can conveniently purchase the hotel services from Comfort inn through online platforms. In addition to this, Comfort inn has created effective mechanism to manage the service delivery activities engaged by employees. When consumers step into the hotel lobby, front desk staffs will serve the customers, and will help customers check in. After then, service staffs of Comfort inn will direct consumers to check in their rooms. After consumers wants to check out, the front desk staffs will provide checkout services to consumers. By systematize its service delivery process; the Comfort inn is able to provide its customers with excellent customer services. Benefiting from excellent service delivery process, the hotel can further hence customer satisfaction, and thus achieve business success.Physical evidencePhysical evidence is non-human factors of service encounter. Normally, physical environment will directly influence consumers’perception. In business operations process, Comfort inn creates good physical evidence by taking the following actions. On the one hand, Comfort inn is committed to create a comfortable and cleanaccommodation environment by keeping cleanness of guest room. On the other hand, the hotel is committed to provide full facilities spa rooms, air conditioning, refrigerators,iron, toasters, indoor heated swimming pool, and laundry facilities etc. The physical evidence shown by Comfort inn to consumers helps to make consumers to generate a positive perception and to improve their satisfaction towards it services.ReferencesBuddhichiwin, P. (2015), The Marketing Mix in Small Hotels: the case of Samui, Thailand, International Organization for Research and Development, pp. 1-6. Blythe, J (2009). Key Concepts in Marketing. Los Angeles: SAGE Publications Ltd. Kotler, P., & Armstrong, G. (2014). Principles of Marketing (16th ed.). Pearson Mudie, P., & Cottam, A. (2010). Management and Marketing of Services. (2nd ed.). Routledge.Rafiq, M &Ahmed, P.K (1995). Using the 7Ps as a generic marketing mix: an exploratory survey of UK and European marketing academics", Marketing Intelligence & Planning,13 (9), pp.4 – 15.Prapannetivuth, A. (2015), The Marketing Mix in Small Sized Hotels: A Case of Pattaya, Thailand, International Journal of Social, Behavioral, Educational, Economic, Business and Industrial Engineering, 9(11), pp. 3903-3906.Shahin, A., & Samea, M. (2010). Developing the Models of Service Quality Gaps: A Critical Discussion. Business Management and Strategy. 1(1), pp. 1-11. Schindler, R,M. 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