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Impact of E-commerce Development to The Business Strategy of Travel Agencies using A Resource-bsed Theory

The application of Global Internet gives birth to a new trading method, electronic commerce (EC). Because EC possesses advantages such as rapid circulation, far-reaching, low cost, and anytime and anywhere etc., the development of EC replaces the information, contacts, and consultation processes in some traditional sales channels and even develops into direct mode of shopping. Tourism products belong to intangible experiential services with characteristics such as heterogeneity, intangibility, and perishability etc., which makes the travel industry an information intensive industry and is very suitable for the development of EC.
Resource-based theory is used as a framework to study its application on the travel industry in this research. It is combined with field interviews and case analysis to study the tourism EC. The critical success factors for travel agencies to develop EC are summarized through the analysis and comprehensive comparison of two different types of travel agencies. It is found that the profitability of tourism EC is mainly dominated by cost leading strategy with the differentiation strategy as a supplement. However, the differentiation strategy can attract customers and lock them in; the most important among them is to enhance the added values. Enterprises will transform their organization structure and strategies according to their own characteristics and resources during the development of EC and the tourism industry belongs to information flow intensive industry in which the deployment of EC requires a set of suitable and complete business model to have a high possibility of success.
The research results show that ¡§fully understanding customers¡¦ needs¡¨ is the necessary capability to develop EC successfully and customer and member base is the critical success factor. Also, ¡§value creation¡¨ can be achieved through the development of social networks and blog marketing; at the same time, the research also shows that travel agencies are gradually developing cross channel integration in the process of developing electronic commerce: whether it is virtual travel agency moving from virtual to brick and mortar or traditional agency moving from brick and mortar to virtual, they tend to move toward the integration of click-and-mortar. EC is not just simply establishing a web site: it also includes solving problems such as internal process transformation, computerization, networking, and communicating with external resources etc. It bounds to change certain part of work which employees perform currently and induces behavior changes in consumers. The critical point to the success of the tourism EC is how to coordinate so that employees will accept the new work model and consumers will accept new consumption method.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:NSYSU/oai:NSYSU:etd-0722109-182512
Date22 July 2009
CreatorsChen, Huang-jui
ContributorsChin-tarn Lee, Huei-mei Liang, Chen-tsung Huang
PublisherNSYSU
Source SetsNSYSU Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Archive
LanguageCholon
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext
Formatapplication/pdf
Sourcehttp://etd.lib.nsysu.edu.tw/ETD-db/ETD-search/view_etd?URN=etd-0722109-182512
Rightsnot_available, Copyright information available at source archive

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