engleski

The Use of Internet: An Opportunity or a Threath to Traditional Distribution in Tourism

Fast development of information technology (IT) over the last twenty years and since the early 90s of the Internet and the World Wide Web (WWW) in particular, marked the beginning of a new era in human communications. These developments have been accompanied by a series of revolutionary changes in the way business transactions are being carried out. Intranet, Extranet and Internet and their increasing application in day to day business activities have enabled efficiency and productivity hardly imaginable twenty years ago. Some industries in countries with a very high level of Internet use have been recording constant growth in the sales of their goods and services via the Internet. Fundamental structural changes in the global tourism market, manifested not only in different forms of horizontal and vertical integration, mergers and acquisitions, atypical changes in the ownership structure of tourism companies but also in the evaluation of tourists’ behaviour and their perception of the quality tourism services had the inevitable impact on the need to redefine business strategies of tourism companies, particularly their sales and distribution policies. The tourism industry was quick to recognize the possibilities of applying modern information technologies as potential channels of communication with the market. As a consequence, web sites were flooded with tourism information. The Internet proved not only an effective promotional instrument or useful vehicle to improve the range of services offered to tourists but has recently been affirming itself not only as a supplement to traditional distribution channels but as a threat to them. The Internet as a vehicle for direct sales and distribution brings significant costs savings, accessing information is fast and simple, the market offer is increasingly transparent and current offers can at any given time and at a short notice reach the global market. This enables fast adaptation to the market changes, and increasingly more sophisticated applications for logfile analysis give tourism companies an ever greater ability to customise their services for individual categories of tourists. The main objective of research presented in this paper was to determine the level of Internet usage in the business activities among Zagreb based travel agencies, to identify main areas of application (to provide information, promotion vehicle, distribution channel), to point to some of the barriers influencing faster affirmation and broader use of new technologies in business activities and to discover views of employees in Zagreb based travel agencies about the importance of using the Internet as a potential channel of distribution for their products, and if the Internet poses a real threat to conventional methods of doing business in travel agencies.

Information Technology; Internet; Distribution; Electronic Commerce; Croatia; Tourism

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