Determination of online reservation for hotel services

Travel agency is an intermediary between suppliers of travel industries to customers who need their services. This intermediary is now developed as an online travel agency due to the involvement of the internet. With the emergence of internet and its application, allow the travellers to access for the information search and booking of hotel easily to be done in virtual environment. The objective of study is to explore the factor for online travel agency through exploratory factor analysis, to determine the relationship among the factors and lastly, to examine which factor influence the travellers when booking hotel through online travel agency. This research used nonprobability approach with convenience sampling method. About 450 questionnaire were given in the location of the survey, however only 410 were collected from the respondents. For the data analysis, the researcher used 398 questionnaires because the remaining 12 questionnaires were discarded. Result shows that exploratory factor analysis has identified 13 factors which were suitable for online travel agency. As for the Pearson correlation result, all the variables have positive relationships and significant with each other except for special events capabilities and repurchase intention as these two variables has negative relationships but significant between each other. Furthermore, the study extends the analysis through multiple regression analysis by considering repurchase intention as a dependent variable. Result indicates four factors (accessibility, online booking features, hotel basic infrastructure and special events capabilities) were found to be significantly influence the travellers

The determinants of online hotel reservations among university staffs

To compete in the current business environment, hoteliers need to cut down their distribution costs and adopt the electronic distribution channels such as the Internet.However, Malaysian hotels have been relatively slow in adapting this due to the current preference of using traditional method of room reservation by hotel patrons. Based from the literature review of the Internet users, a public university was chosen to represent one of the profiles of Internet users.A sample of 193 respondents was collected and the findings indicated that profiles conformed to previous studies.In adopting online reservation, online “bookers” would look for fast, reliable and convenient system. Price is a key motivator to purchase online. The findings are important in encouraging more hoteliers to adopt and implement online hotel reservations as part of their main sales mechanism

Factor affecting the adoption of information and communication technology in the tourism sector of the Maldives

For many Small Island Developing States (SIDS) like the Maldives, tourism is a significant area of business. The increasing reliance on information and communication technology (ICT) in the tourism industry has become one of the major challenges facing developing countries, especially the SIDS. The success of the tourism industry in SIDS is closely associated with the use of ICT applications and e-business techniques. This research studied the extent of utilisation of e-business and the issues that arise in its adoption and use in the organizations that make up the tourism industry of the Maldives. A theoretical framework was developed to identify the issues pertaining to use of ICT and e-business. The research was qualitative in nature and used a combination of grounded theory and multi-grounded theory approaches for data analysis in order to develop a new theoretical framework. This inductive process resulted in three emergent themes: representing three domains Country, Sector, and Information Systems (IS). ICT or e-business adoption and integration in the tourism organizations is affected by Sector, which is by and large influenced by the Country, which in turn impacts on the IS domain. These three complementary themes formed a new theoretical framework, generating a set of factors and institutional forces affecting the adoption and integration of ICT or e-business in the tourism organisations of the Maldives. This study contributes to our understanding of e-business in developing countries, in particular to small island developing states with islandness, like the Maldives