E-commerce in the travel and tourism industry in Sub-Saharan Africa

The e-commerce revolution in business can help African countries expand their tourism industry. Africa, with its great wealth in wildlife and unique resorts, can benefit from the ever increasing user population of the Internet, particularly in the USA and Western Europe where most of the tourists to Africa come from (Internet World Stats, 2004). E-commerce which runs on the backbone of the Internet can help the African tourism industry break into international tourism, thus increasing the flows of the much needed foreign currency. As there was little empirical data on the e-commerce activities in the African tourism industry the researcher first and foremost examined a large number of websites in order to paint a picture of the nature and extent of the e-commerce activities in four -African countries. For comparison, websites of tourism organisations from USA and Western Europe were also examined. The surveys revealed that few of the African organisations are embracing e-commerce and that although some websites were comparable to those of their western counterparts the majority had room for considerable improvement. After examining the websites another survey was carried out to find the current progress of e-commerce adoption and usage from the perspective of the African tourism organisations. Analysis of the data collected showed that e-commerce adoption among the tourism organisations was slow. This led to more surveys being carried out to find the barriers to e-commerce among tourism organisations with information-only websites and those whose websites had limited interactive facilities. These surveys revealed that tourism organisations with information-only websites faced more barriers than those with websites which had limited interactive features. They also revealed that the most common barriers were technological and security and legal barriers. The ultimate survey involved finding out from tourism organisations with fully-fledged e-commerce websites how they overcame the e-commerce barriers. The methods used by these organisations to overcome e-commerce barriers together with recommendations made in the surveys carried out earlier were used to formulate recommendations and guidelines for those organisations intending to adopt and e-commerce. The recommendations and guidelines were tested and results showed that they are helpful and easy to follow

CLOUD COMMERCE - A DESIGN SCIENCE ENDEAVOR TOWARDS NEXT GENERATION ELECTRONIC COMMERCE

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Technologicalship in e-banking services: a constraint or contributor to relationship marketing in retail banking in East London, Eastern Cape, South Africa

Contemporarily, one of the major business demands is to extensively understand the impact of technology on the major business strategies and practices. Technologicalship marketing, a concept investigated in this study, emanates from a symbiosis of technology and relationship marketing. Per se, a prevalent area of debate pertains to whether technology promotes or constrains relationships. Outstandingly, this study pursued the technologicalship marketing concept, a new and vital 21st century suggestion in literature (Zineldin, 2000:16). Secondly, against the scarcity of empirical studies in mass marketing environments, the study at hand focused on retail banking client relationships. Lastly, the proposed meta-construct hypothetical model is an essential relationship marketing instrument. The proposed model consists of four major relationship marketing construct categories, namely, personal contact, customer retention, customer switching and relational exchange. At the hand of these constructs, the research primarily aimed to determine the impact of technology on client relationships in e-banking with the focus of closing the gap prevalent in literature on whether technology constraints or supports relationship marketing. The study focused on retail banking client relationships of the four major commercial banks in East London, Eastern Cape, South Africa. A survey was conducted of a sample of 200 clients selected using the convenience sampling method. The study hypothesised that technology is resulting in more transactional than relationship marketing in retail banking by constraining social constructions, customer retention and relational exchange, whilst, promoting customer switching mobility. Through the GLM regression analysis method, findings of the study established that technology was to a larger extent supporting relationship marketing. However, it is envisaged that technology is resulting in the disappearance of human contact which is a critical aspect of relationships. Conclusively, the researcher recommended that the only plausible strategy is to endeavour to integrate the human aspect at self-service podiums e.g. mounting of staff at ATM points, which most banks have been doing