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

Tourism
1. Emporion realised early on that there was a great potential for ICT based solutions in
tourism, which constitutes one of Croatia’s strongest economic sectors;
2. Emporion’s internal research on the state-of-the-art of online tourism in Croatia
revealed that there was no (appropriate) presentation of private accommodation
offerings on the internet in terms of “what you see [accommodations] is what you
get”.
3. As a result, a business model for the presentation and booking of private accommodations
was developed, implemented and tested in the framework of a project. The
first online reservation via the adriatica.net website was made in 2000, one month
after the website went online.
4. Within its first year, the model had already proved to be economically feasible and
viable. This reinforced the intention to further develop adriatica.net. In May 2002,
adriatica.net dissociated itself from Emporion and started to work as an autonomous
company with technical personnel from Emporion.
The initial business steps of adriatica.net can be summarised as follows:
- Selection of accommodation providers across the whole Croatian coast; 54
- Convincing the accommodation providers to participate in adriatica.net;
- Collecting the data on every single accommodation unit for the online data base;
- Setup of the website and presentation of the data;
- Starting of (online and traditional) marketing activities to promote adriatica.net;
- Booking and reservation activities.
Business activity and the market
adriatica.net started as an online company, but has since increasingly extended its
business activities into “traditional” business fields by acquiring high street tour operators
and travel agencies. 55
In the year 2005, 75,000 tourists visited Croatia via adriatica.net and 282,000 via the
services of the adriatica.net group. In 2005, the adriatica.net group registered a turnover
of € 85.2 million, which is a 15% growth compared to the previous year. At the same time,
for the year 2006 a 30% growth is expected, equating a turnover of € 100 million.
In contrast to the predominantly national supply structure, its customer base is to a large
extent international. No source market holds a share bigger than 14%, however. Most
customers in 2006 came from countries Hungary (14%), France (12%), Italy (12%),
Germany (10%), Croatia (7%), Poland (6%), Czech Republic (5%) and Slovenia (4%).
adriatica.net has a market share of about 0.75% (75,000 incoming tourists) of the total
Croatian tourism market and in the context of its wider adriatica.net group a market share
54
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The selection process is based on a point system reflecting the following five quality criteria:
contents and furniture (kitchen equipment), surrounding area (garden, entrance), interior
(general atmosphere and installations), cleanliness and (the relationship of) hirer/owner (to the
guests). In order to maintain and increase the quality of the offer, each year the selected
accommodations are re-evaluated and 10% of the units with poorer quality are excluded from
the offer and/or replaced by accommodations with higher evaluation marks.
E.g. Riva Tours (Germany), Odisej (Slovenia), Ilirika Turizem (regional chain of tourist agencies
in Slovenia, Croatia, Italy, Serbia and Montenegro) and Atlas Airtours (Croatia).
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