Cloud Computing in Tourism

With rapid growth and development in technology, cloud computing has become a dominant platform for small businesses as well as major enterprises. Cloud computing streamlines the overall delivery of services and resources, helps keeping the costs in control, and global business is set for a huge change in the way businesses are done. The substantial transformation over the past few years has evolved tourism industry towards Tourism 3.0, where the consumers can easily connect to travel websites and interact by sharing their experiences. This considerably influences the perceptions, expectations and decisions both the actual as well as and potential travelers. This provides sufficient reasons for the tourism industry players to adopt and adept themselves with the latest advancements in the information technology, and the adoption of cloud computing is key in this regard as it provides easy access to a web platform that offers more productive, efficient, and competitive services to promote tourism as a vehicle of sustainable development.

Digital Marketing Strategies for Accessible Tourism

This chapter addresses the applications of digital marketing in the construct of communicational practices aimed at target audiences that have some physical, motor, psychological, or other disabilities, who require additional information or specialized advice to fully comprehend all elements involved, when planning/deciding to travel. Throughout the text there are several references of the conceptual framework, as well as several examples of case studies that highlight some of the practices used in diversified contexts, using digital tools as privileged means of intervention in the different dimensions required to support the so-called accessible tourism.

Management and Implications of Daily Deal Promotions in the Hospitality Industry

Discounting, a common practice in the hotel industry, used in order to mitigate seasonal demand fluctuation, was especially prominent at the time of the most recent recession. This coupled with consumer saving trends gave rise to the phenomenon of daily deal or flash sale websites. These are often also referred to as social shopping or group buying marketplaces and combine attractive discount for customers who propagate their offer using their social media channels. Though daily deal websites represent an interesting and multi-faceted e-commerce phenomenon, their nature within hospitality inventory distribution landscape remains largely unknown, even more so, their implications, particularly for the hotel industry. This chapter sets to fill this gap by collecting and structuring the available knowledge about daily deal websites according to the following themes: motivators for their use, profitability-related issues, marketing implications, operational issues, impacts upon branding.

The Role of Digital Marketing and Online Relationship Quality in Social Tourism

The literature widely suggests that the digital media has greatly impacted the way a marketer reaches today's consumer. The adaptive process enabled by the digital technologies creates value in new ways in new digital environments. Therefore, social tourism has been defined as the effects and phenomena that result from the participation in tourism and more specifically from the participation of low-income groups. The chapter focuses on accessible tourism and tourism for all. A case study will be present. This chapter will discuss the increasing phenomena of online relationship and digital marketing in specific social tourism contexts. Based on the literature review, the authors will develop a research propositions that connect the online relationship quality dimension developed by the relational marketing (i.e., online contexts) with the consequent e-satisfaction and word-of-mouth (eWOM). The authors also considered some implications for management, as well as give suggestions for future lines of research.

Building the Friendly Airline Brand

Hospitality, the hosting behavior that brings convivial and personalized services with the ultimate aim to provide psychological comfort to guests, is a growing success criterion for service firms in today's new, experience-based economy, and thus has received considerable scientific attention in the service industries literatures. In this stream of research, most of the researchers have examined airline hospitality by taking the view pre-flight, in-flight, post-flight tangible and intangible service quality factors in an integrative manner. However, recent researches have pointed out that the airline industry has evolved in a direction where the intangible factor, such as hospitality of the cabin crew, stands out rather than its concrete functions such as “transport.” In the light of this argument, the purpose of this study is, by examining various cases, to theoretically reveal the airline hospitality as a new and fresh perspective that need to be emphasized in digital marketing activities to create widespread impact on customer experiences.

Analysis of the Vision and Mission Statements in the Websites

The purpose of the present study is to analyze the website-declared vision and mission statements of 149 five-star hotels in the largest cities of Turkey, Istanbul, Ankara, and Izmir, based on certain criteria. The outcomes of the research indicated that only 24% of the hotels had a mission statement and 21% had a vision statement. Hotels with the least number of statements were those in Istanbul (17%). It was determined that hotels provided highly limited information on the product/market area component in their mission statements (19%). Moreover, it was determined that although hotels fully reflected their basic ideology in vision statements, almost half of them (48%) failed to place an emphasis on the future in their statements.

Mobile Technology Acceptance Among Turkish Travelers

Mobile devices, such as smartphones, have influenced people's lives more than any other technological invention in human history. Thanks to the ubiquitous nature and advantage of mobile technologies, mobile marketing has remarkable potential. A successful mobile marketing strategy is related to consumers' acceptance and use of mobile technology. Understanding the factors that affect the consumers' technology acceptance process is important in terms of developing an effective marketing strategy. As one of the rapidly growing industries around the world, tourism has always been in the frontline in terms of using the new technologies and used the advantages of the synergy generated by the technologies. In this study, which is designed based on the technology acceptance model (TAM), smartphone usage experience and the factors which affect the acceptance levels of travelers were investigated. In this study, it is aimed to determine mobile technology acceptance among Turkish travelers. Based on the results, a few managerial implications are drawn in this chapter.

Photographic Image, Credibility, and Consumption of Tourism in the Digital Era

This chapter seeks to bring the communication field and tourism closer together. In this sense, the authors use photographic images and photography through authors from different areas. They believe that hospitality and tourism as a transdisciplinary field deserve a wide and transversal discussion. In addition, they seek with this work to discuss the mediatized society, with the instantaneousness of the “digital world” in technological devices, within the context of tourism communication. Likewise, it seeks to promote a discussion about the importance of selecting the right tools in the strategy to promote the tourist photographic image with regard to the theme of marketing and communication, in the sense of reaching certain audiences (consumers, or not, of the tourist activity). Finally, it concludes that the use of new technologies by tourists during their stay may increase the credibility of the information disclosed because tourists, as well as consumers, have an important role in the production of information.

Traveler Decision Making in Online vs. Offline Buying Behavior

The growing preference of consumers to search for information and make web purchases in travel and tourism context is forcing a number of enterprises to go online. Looking at the complexity that already lies in offline decision making, attracting consumers online, understanding their psychology, and making them purchase is becoming a stringent job for the marketers. Though significant research work has been done in terms of adoption of website services for travel websites, a comparative understanding of the offline and online purchase decision-making process of the consumer and how that can be leveraged in making the consumer loyal through continuous usage of the website services still needs an in-depth understanding. In this chapter, the authors have tried to differentiate between online and offline behavior and proposed a model based on intention adoption and continuance framework which will surely provide insights to both the academicians and marketers/website developers in terms of improving the online buying behavior of consumers in travel and tourism context.

The Digital Tourism Business

In recent years, the development of new technologies and, in particular, the internet has encouraged industries such as the tourism to adapt their business models to the new forms of marketing in the 21st century. Therefore, the objective of this research is to carry out a systematic literature review (SLR) on the main published research studies in the field of digital tourism business (DTB) with the aim of defining what are the essential digital marketing strategies and their trends for the years coming. The results of the research identify techniques such as SEO, SEM, ASO, Sentiment analysis, textual analysis, based-location social media networks, remarketing and programmatic advertising, social ads influencers marketing, and eWOM (internet word of mouth) as the main digital marketing techniques for digital tourism business. Likewise, the main trends for the tourism digital sector have been identified. The results of this research study can be used by practitioners to improve their digital marketing strategies within the digital tourism ecosystem.