Pros & Cons of E-Tourism

Using internet for e-tourism do bring benefits, such as the E-commerce provides new channels for the global marketing of products and services, and presents opportunities to create new businesses providing information and other knowledge-based intangible products. In 2000, Pappas has mentioned four aspects of marketing in tourism industry which have been changed by the advent of E-commerce:

1. Helps to improve the promotion of products and services through direct, interactive and rich information contact with customers.

2.      Establishes a direct online distribution channel.
3.      Causes savings in administrative and communication costs.
4.      Enhances customer service by enabling customers to find detailed information online, and by answering standard E-mail questions with intelligent agents and human expert systems.

Finally, customers need less time to find more information upon tourism products and make comparisons. While in 2001, Porter defined some other benefits include better management of information, better integration of suppliers and vendors, better channel partnership, lower transaction costs, better market understanding, and expanded geographical coverage. A report which has been gathered by Scottish parliament in 2002, has mentioned the following benefits of E-tourism:

-          It is the most cost effective way of communicating with target markets and disseminating information.

-          It is a quick and easy way for the customer to buy travel products.

-          It offers opportunities for improvements in customer service and retention through meeting and promoting individual preferences.

-          It helps to reduce costs through increased efficiency in internal operations and purchasing processes.

-          Facilitates high quality design of products and services in the tourism industry, through continuously refined information about current and potential customers to anticipate and respond to their needs.

-          Enhances the degree of externalization of some tourism services. Management information systems like Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and database technologies can facilitate supplier-customer relationships and the electronic analysis and transfer of information.

-          It encourages greater co-operation amongst traditional competitors through the provision of hypertext links. Links are a cheap, quick way of raising the profile of a new site and getting round the difficulty of up-dating information in-house.

About the satisfaction in E-tourism, it has mention that E-tourism firms use internet to better serve their customers. Customer relationship management is a crucial subject which firms take special attention to, which directly or indirectly results in Customer satisfaction, Customer loyalty and finally Customer retention. Among these concepts customer satisfaction can relatively influence customer loyalty and retention which in turns increases firms profit and efficiency. CRM as a research topic has attracted much attention since the beginning of the 1990s. However, in a new E-commerce context the concept of CRM and its core subject, customer satisfaction, has not been studied sufficiently yet. This study is going to fill this gap by finding the important factors which can lead to E-satisfaction in the tourism industry.

In the previous the pros of E-Tourism was mentioned. Although E-tourism has variety of pros but on the other hand it had some cons too.  From the journal that I read from “International Journal of Advances in Management Science” (http://www.ij-ams.org), I had finalized and summary out some cons of E-Tourism. Below are the cons of E-Tourism:

Stress between growing demands for personalized services tailored to the individual’s needs, demands, interests and lack of willingness or desire to do or accept something amongst consumers to release such information over the Internet in case it is improper.

The preference of many customers to conduct complicated transactions in a face-to-face environment. Nowadays most of customers using online booking/ transaction, but some of the customer prefer face-to-face transaction, especially baby boomer because it is more trustable compare with online transaction.

In this century, technology had become people daily needs and common thing, especially internet. Nowadays, everything can be search and found online, for example google search and yahoo. So, nowadays people who want to travel can search accommodation, flight ticket, tour packages, transportation rental and etc online. This had causes travel agent business being displace, with resultant job losses.

(Resourced from Google search image )

The impact of internet on tourism industry Since the emergence of E-commerce is very crucial for tourism firms, all of them including small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), are eager to apply that in their business. SMEs face some challenges for implementing E-tourism. It has been argued that the challenges and issues faced by the industry include limited access to technology.

Resourced by: http://www.ij-ams.org/