The European e-Business Report The European e ... - empirica

The European E-Business Report 2005
CRM application may prove profitable for individual service providers and the destination as a whole
alike.
Innovative mobile e-services. Mobile digital services may serve tourists conveniently while travelling
and during their stay. While most established e-commerce applications deal with customer needs in
the pre-trip or after-trip phases, there is a lack of applications serving the tourist on-the-spot or on the
way to the destination. Some m-commerce applications are already available today, but the quality of
their contents, the technological implementation and the ease of using such services varies
considerably. The market for such services is still in its infancy. However, location-based systems
promise to flood the market with new and innovative e-services.
Re-intermediation and dis-intermediation are likely to occur in parallel in this industry, which can be
regarded as an 'opportunity' or 'risk' – depending on the perspective. From the perspective of an
accommodation provider, dis-intermediation may be positive: skipping of traditional intermediaries,
such as travel agencies, and interacting directly with potential guests online may save commissions
and increase profitability. On the other hand, travel agencies and tour operators perceive disintermediation
as an existential threat.
Risks and barriers
However, there are still barriers to further uptake, for example asymmetrical adoption of e-business
across tourism sub-sectors. Apart from disparities in e-business adoption of due to different size of
companies, the uptake of e-business in tourism also varies between its different sub-sectors. This may
create barriers for the networking of different types of tourism companies, which is important, for
instance, for dynamic packaging of bundles of products or services for customers online.
Inadequate ICT solutions for SMEs. Not surprisingly, large companies are applying ICT and e-
business solutions more vigorously than SMEs. This is especially true for sophisticated applications
such as CRM. Many SMEs tend to consider such technologies too expensive and too complicated for
usage in their daily business environment. Overall, today’s software suppliers and ICT service
providers seem like neglecting SMEs in the tourism sector, although the latter might constitute an
important ICT market in the near future.
Lacking cooperation within e-business networks. In tourism, the product usually consists of a
bundle of services from different stakeholders within the sector. Therefore, it is much more efficient for
service providers to create networks for their business operation and marketing than trying to act
individually. DMOs may be a visible form of such cooperation. Yet, DMOs often lack the support of
important stakeholders within their region, which may hamper destination management seriously.
Especially in the online economy, which is a networking economy by nature, disparate collaboration
between tourism companies within a destination limits the prospects for successful e-business
networks.
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