E-Tourism in Europe The E-CRM and ITCs adoption issues: how to retain customers?

2. .4 Trends and Challenges of the European e-tourism market

We can state that the demand for tourism products and services is growing steadily. Travel sites such as the well known Last-minute.com or Expedia.com are still going strong. In addition to these sites, new sites are created on a constant basis. As a result, the UK, Germany and France are expecting further growth in online travel bookings through 2007.

The proportion of processes integration is slightly higher in larger enterprises integrating their purchasing systems with customers. Consequently, we can say that it is going to lead to the "standardisation" of the tourism industry as the products and services supplied are quite similar, every time the e-customer encounters the organisation. In addition, we must consider that the tourism industry must ensure the delivery of timely and consistent goods. There must be a short time between the production of the tourist product and the point of sale.

From an e-marketing and e-sales perspective, the tourism industry can be considered as one of the leading industries. Tourism seems to have explored all the new possibilities provided by the Internet in order to improve customer relations. Even individual enterprises are able to directly contact customers avoiding intermediaries. This direct contact with the market led the firms to react instantly to the market changes. However the online selling percentage is still growing.

Considering that the tourism industry is mainly dominated by micro and small enterprises, it impacts the adoption of ICT and thus e-business. It seems that the setting up of IT systems and the allocation of resources for e-business is costly and difficult as small businesses do not own the right competencies. In fact, the ICT field had been largely dominated by the larger enterprises. We can assert that the difficulties encountered by the smallest firms are due to the high level of expenditures. In addition, the absence of systems available for micro and small scale companies is another key reason. Small sized firms can only benefit from a limited number of functions provided in these systems. It is true that most of the IT solutions require the "critical mass" factor in order to become profitable to the e-customers and thus the firm.

Consequently, it can be rational for small businesses not to use these IT solutions as they did not reach the critical level of users they can benefit from. That is the main reason why small businesses are still falling behind their larger counterparts. In order to resolve this problem, relationships and networking can be an effective solution. However, SMEs must meet the standards and levels of their partners or networks in order to maximize their e-businesses strategies.