Integrated Electronic Customer Relationship Management (CRM) for Alpine Tourist Destinations: Drivers and an Adoption Framework

Abstract

Integrated customer relationship management (CRM) processes between service providers and destination management organizations (DMOs) are essential to bring about the cooperation enabling a tourism region to remain competitive. While DMOs face the threat of disintermediation and need to respond with higher level services, service providers, particularly small and medium-sized tourism enterprises (SMTEs) have considerable potential within their CRM processes for efficiency improvement. One possible scenario to solve this dilemma would be a partnership between the service providers and the DMO in the field of CRM processes. In this integrative CRM approach the DMO provides both the required information and communication technologies (ICT) infrastructure and the processing of specific tasks. Currently, the outsourcing of CRM processes is hardly practised in the DMO context. The derived research model explains which factors drive the service providers’ intention to increase the outsourcing level, identifies destination management systems (DMS) as enablers of integrated electronic CRM and offers a thorough understanding of the critical factors influencing cooperative CRM between DMOs and SMTEs.