Abstract
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.
Highlights
Tourism considered as an important sector in the economy of many countries, due to the income generated by the consumption of goods and services by tourists, and the income from imposed taxes on businesses in the tourism industry, as well as tourism creates a huge opportunities for people to work in tourism-related service industries
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 reviews the current literature on the e-commerce usage and competitive advantage in small and medium tourism enterprises (SMTEs) and the development of Internet usage in the tourism and hospitality industries in the past few years
Summary
Tourism considered as an important sector in the economy of many countries, due to the income generated by the consumption of goods and services by tourists, and the income from imposed taxes on businesses in the tourism industry, as well as tourism creates a huge opportunities for people to work in tourism-related service industries. There has to be a more deep approach and as Porter (2001), claimed Internet technology must be used to reconfigure traditional activities. Researchers agree that the contribution made by the tourism sector in developing economies is substantial. SMTEs are noted for their failure to derive optimal benefits from using the Internet for business to improve their competitiveness (Murphy and Kielgast, 2008). With respect to the explanation about the internet spaces and the level of sophistication use of the spaces by Angerhn (1997) and due to the rapid growth of internet use and web technology and its expansion to include many functions. 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
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