The Impact of Internet on Travel Industry in Australia

Abstract

The Internet appears to be playing a role in restructuring of some traditional business sectors in which some organizations profit and some decline. Travel agencies are being subjected to increased competition from virtual on-line travel agencies. These agencies do not possess the traditional retail outlets but exist predominantly on the Web. In addition, airline companies and travel wholesalers are beginning to market their products directly to the consumer. Despite the threat of disintermediation, the Internet has created opportunities for the travel agency as it provides a method of providing service around the clock and of being accessible from home and workplace. This paper reports on an Australia-wide study that has been undertaken to investigate: the take-up rates of Web technology within travel agencies; the perception of travel agents of the significance of the WWW on the industry; the levels of planning and strategies used by travel agencies when investigating the use of the WWW; the perceptions of the key obstacles and barriers to adopting the WWW; the key issues in the process of implementing the technology in travel agencies. Whilst the pessimists forecast a very bleak outlook for travel agencies, those that do re-engineer with a new vision and strategy have the opportunity to be amongst the leaders in the sector. Focusing on becoming information service providers is one option that travel agents can take. However, given the rapid rate of change in electronic commerce and the varying patterns of adoption, it is still not clear how severe the shake-out of this important industry sector will be.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 28 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.