A Proposed Framework for E-Commerce Usage and Competitive Advantage on Small and Medium Tourism Enterprises (SMTES) in Lebanon

E-commerce has tremendous potential for creating business opportunities, tourism as information intensive industry can gain important synergies from the use of e-commerce. Small and medium sized tourism enterprises should take advantage of the e-commerce and refocus their business strategies to maintain their competitiveness in order to avoid being replaced. This paper discusses the current literature on the e-commerce usage and competitive advantage in small and medium tourism enterprises (SMTEs), and proposes a conceptual framework to be tested in the context of Lebanon. This paper adopted a content analysis to examine number of articles that were published by major tourism and e-commerce usage journals. This paper provides a conceptual framework, which mainly based on the e-commerce readiness model, which has been used to assess the e-commerce usage at firms’ level. Also provides a revised ICDT model to explore how tourism enterprises are exploiting the internet spaces and to measure the level of sophisticated use of internet among tourism SMEs. This paper improves knowledge on how small tourism enterprises exploit Internet spaces (ICDT) to improve their competitiveness

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

The Impact of E-commerce on Sierra Leone Tourism Industry

The importance of electronic commerce is felt and greatly emphasized in the present business field. Today, all the industries have started adopting e-commerce concepts, where tourism is probably the most affected industry by e-commerce. The E-tourism and its utility provide a lot of information on Sierra Leone destination, hotels, facilities, price and tariff, geographical features and climate. More number of companies integrated all the services on their websites and provides a complete package with a competitive price to the required customers. E-tourism companies in Sierra Leone also provide mobile application facilities to the consumers. E-tourism companies need to follow certain procedures laid down by the Government. The objectives of the study is to identify the level of impact of e-commerce technology on tourism industry in Sierra Leone and the opportunities and challenges. A systematic research methodology is adopted, data has been collected from the tour operators through questionnaire and suitable statistical tools were applied. With the help of the collected data a detailed analysis was made, understand the impact of e- Commerce on Sierra Leone tourism industry identify the opportunities and challenges as well as the market trend

A Study on the Construction of Tourism E-commerce System Based on Semantic Web Services

This paper presents a novel method of constructing a tourism e-commerce platform based on semantic web services. In order to solve the puzzles of web services discovery, system adaptability, automatically assembling and calling caused by bad system semantic interoperability in tourism e-commerce based on traditional web services, we construct a novel tourism e-commerce system framework based on semantic web services, which uses semantic services layer to replace the representation layer in the traditional model. Experiment proves that the framework owns the superiority of platform irrelevance, system highly seamless integration, high semantic interoperability and intelligence, and can solve the low semantics in tourism e-business system well

AN INVESTIGATION ON WEBSITE ADOPTION AND PERFORMANCE ON IRANIAN HOTELS

This study investigates website adoption and performance among Iranian hotels. Using content analysis technique, this study identifies the presence of 28 website features on 57 Iranian hotels. The results found Iranian hotels are at very early stage of Internet adoption. E-commerce activities are very minimal among the Iranian hotels as none of the hotels provide online reservation. This study adds to the limited study of e-commerce and hospitality in Iran.E-tourism, Website, Evaluation, Hotel, Iran

Tourism and e-commerce

Consists primarily of the distributing, buying, selling, marketing and servicing of products or services over electronic systems such as the Internet and other computer networks. It can involve electronic funds transfer, supply chain management, e-marketing, online marketing, online transaction processing, electronic data interchange (EDI), automated inventory management systems and automated data collection systems. It typically uses electronic communication technology such as the Internet, extranet, e-mail, e-books, database, and mobil phones. All these are usually used in tourism activity. E-commerce was initially used for advertising the products and services offered by the tour- operators. At present this way of commerce is more and more used by the potential tourists. Romanian tourism agencies and tour-operators have begun to line at the global trends and they are building the sites, not only for information, but also for selling touristic products and services. For example, in September 2006, from 695 ANAT’s (National Association for Tourism Agencies) members, 657 (94.53%) have an e-mail and 435 (62.59%) have sites.E-commerce; Tourism; Reservations; Site.

Market Value Chain and Web Marketing in Tourism Context

Web marketing refers to a broad category of advertising that takes many different forms, but generally involves any marketing activity conducted online.Information and communication technology (ICT) developments are permeating every aspect of tourism marketing. This paper proposes a methodological framework, which will enable tourism businesses to develop and implement their electronic marketing and commerce activities. This paper initially reviews the e-business models literature. In the second section ICT implications in marketing and tourism are discussed. Then it presents the e-tourism business models and subsequently proposes a framework contributing to the planning and implementation of e-commerce initiatives. This methodological framework might also be used to analyse electronic applications in tourism. Keywords: Tourism and Travel industry, Market value chain, web marketing, Business models, Management & Reengineering

ICT for Economic Development in Rwanda: Fostering E-Commerce Adoption in Tourism SMEs

Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in the Rwandan tourism sector are slow in adopting information and communication technology (ICT) and especially e-commerce applications (Nibigira 2014). In the effort to pinpoint the drivers promising more extensive EC roll-out and thus economic and societal ICT-driven improvements in Rwanda, we firstly show some ongoing initiatives that of deploying ICT and e-commerce Rwanda. We then investigate more specifically the key determinants of EC adoption in the context of Rwanda. To that end, we adopt the Perceived E-Readiness Model (PERM) developed by Molla and Licker (2005) and apply it to ecommerce adoption in Rwandan tourism SMEs. From better understanding what accelerates or impedes ICT and e-commerce adoption in the Rwandan tourism sector, we hope to derive arguments for further fostering ICT roll-out in general and the e-commerce roll-out in particular in Rwanda – first throughout the Rwandan tourism sector and subsequently throughout other SME-based business sectors – and thus to contribute to the country\u27s economic and societal development along the lines of many Information and Communication Technology for Development (ICT4D) studies (Heeks 2006, Heeks and Molla 2007, Zelenika and Pearce 2013)

A Study of E-commerce Adoption by Nepalese Tourism Website: Contain Analysis

This study conduct to evaluate e-commerce features adopt by Nepalese tourism websites through content analysis. Information on the website plays a vital role to influence traveler. This study analyses 41 different features of the website of the Nepalese tourism industry. In this research in total examining 120 website's features, and these features are divided into six dimensions: product information, non-product information, reservation, payment, functionality and customer relationship management. The researcher found that there is a significant difference between hotel and travel agencies websites on adopting feature and information provided to their customers. The finding shows that e-commerce is still in the introduction phase in the Nepalese tourism industry. Tourism companies are failing to deliver adequate information on their website. Websites are only focused on product information rather than other information, and there is a significant difference between hotel website and travel agencies websites on adopting features. Websites need to improve their payment, reservation and functionality features on their website. Keywords: E-commerce, content analysis, tourism website DOI: 10.7176/JTHS/46-04 Publication date: January 31st 202