ICT and e-business in the tourism industry ICT adoption ... - empirica

Tourism
situated in attractive and reasonably quiet spots), unique design, unique service, size
(they generally have no more than 20 rooms; typically, they have between 8 and 12
rooms), character and charm (their architecture is appealing, most are historical
buildings, and inside they are tastefully furnished and decorated), atmosphere and
facilities (they offer a good level of comfort and service and a reasonable value-formoney
ratio). These criteria are periodically checked by the staff of yourGreece.
Furthermore, the quality of its services and its member hotels are evaluated by asking
each individual guest for feedback.
After only one and a half years of operation, yourGreece has already a significant number
of recurring guests, and positive recommendations by previous customers.
Planned amendments and future expansion
For the near future it is mainly planned to expand the booking request system. This is
connected with the intention to automate the network’s hotel booking systems (many of
them are still paper based) and to integrate them with the booking system of yourGreece.
This will allow yourGreece to rapidly speed up the checking of the availability of rooms in
the various member hotels. Currently this is still done manually - a process which can be
very time and resource intensive, as yourGreece has to contact each hotel individually by
phone.
However, this is a complicated process because most of these hotels are very small units
and many of them regard information technologies with suspicion. Consequently they
hesitate to invest in IT infrastructure and many of them do not have the ability for major
investments. Therefore yourGreece’s strategy to convince them to acquire relevant
hardware and software, is to bring them additional business: the more business they get
through yourGreece, the more receptive they will be to new ideas and investments.
In addition, yourGreece plans to develop a whole series of customised tours, e.g. winetasting
tours, olive oil tours or tours in remote, rural and unknown areas which will also be
offered via the website. These new tours should attract a wider range of potential
customers. It is also planned to enlarge the customer base by offering its services in
more languages. At the moment the web platform is available only in English. However,
yourGreece does not plan to simply offer translations of its existing services but, in fact,
to provide language and culturally specific services for the German and French speaking
countries, the Scandinavian countries, The Netherlands and Italy.
Eventually, yourGreece intends to enhance its promotion and advertisement activities
over the web and to strengthen the cooperation with Google and Yahoo in order to
increase the visibility of its website and services via the most important search engines.
Impact
Overall, in 2005 about 150 bookings were made over the web platform; in comparison,
only in the first quarter of 2006, already 85 bookings have been made via the platform.
Based on the turnover figures of the first quarter of 2006, and assumed that the growth
rate will continue throughout the year, it is expected that the overall turnover of
yourGreece for 2006 will be at least three times as much as in 2005 (its first year of
operation). Since early 2006, the number of bookings has substantially increased: For
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