ICT IN TOURISM

ICT in Tourism and Hospitality Industry

ICT in Tourism and Hospitality Industry

Introduction

The role of internet has matured in the past couple of years in terms of its usage. Its use has certainly evolved from being just a mere tool for information searching and chatting and connecting with people all over the world to being social marketing tool for businesses all over the world. This medium has certainly added a new dimension for the businesses to cater to a wider audience on just a click of a button. Not only the big businesses, but small and medium enterprises are reaping benefits out of it. Now people can have access to the global markets and get any product from the remotest part of the world. One can plan out their holidays in advance and buy them just by sitting at home. This all seemed impossible if one heads back ten or twenty years from now, but the use of internet have drastically changed over these periods of years. It has certainly changed the way people now plan and book their holidays as it is very much affected by the layout of the website, promotion techniques, attractive packages the tourism providers provide to attract maximum number of consumers. Since this industry thrives mainly on the availability of information, and with the evolution of internet for this purpose specifically, the browsing of information regarding planning out holidays is one of the most searched tasks.

In this assignment we will be critically evaluating how ICT is applied to the Tourism and Hospitality Industries. It's been expected that there would be a transition to more custom made tourism packages for the individuals from mass tourism. With hundreds of tourism businesses operating worldwide, they have made use of the opportunity in the form of internet and have successfully created their very own applications related to e-commerce as well as have laid huge distribution channels and networks, that interlinks the tourism distributors with the suppliers in order to sell the desired services and products.

In this assignment, after the evaluation of the previous studies conducted on competitive advantage and its use in the SMET's, an empirical study is conducted in order to find out their competitive advantage strategies and also the hurdles they are facing in the tourism industry. A small medium enterprise form Turkey is selected and is a part of the study which is owned by a young entrepreneur who seeks to establish a good position in the tourism industry or market place. Also in this case, some of the suggestions and recommendations are made regarding the strategies that could help that owner of the small business to create an upper edge in terms of competition with respect to the adoption of ICT's and e-commerce in the business.

But keeping the SME's in mind, it is not possible for them to lay such huge and vast distribution networks, and for this reason, they usually avoid the expensive distribution channels; at the same time in order to achieve economies ...