No abstract

The emergence of global electronic markets on the Internet has been seen as an opportunity for small and medium‐sized tourism enterprises to improve their competitive position. However, several barriers hinder small hospitality organizations from capitalizing on IT and the Internet. This paper reports on an action research program of introducing Internet technology in a small hotel located in a peripheral region of Finland. As part of a project funded by the European Union, a complete integrated Web booking and hotel management system was developed, denoting a re‐engineering of many business processes. The system, which features customer online (real‐time) reservation services was an inexpensive, user‐friendly solution specially designed for the purposes of small and medium‐sized hospitality organizations with little prior IT knowledge. In the field of online reservation systems, the hotel is a pioneer, as it is the first independent hotel in Finland to offer online reservation services through a non‐customized reservation system.

This paper argues that there are four different ways in which customer value can be created in electronic grocery shopping, but that the chosen business model will set limits to whether ± and to what extent ± the firm will be able to offer value-adding services for consumers. The relationship between business models and customer value in online grocery shopping is exemplified, and some practical problems and opportunities in e-grocering are highlighted by presenting the case of Nettimarket.com, a Finnish Internet grocery business that was founded by an entrepreneur with no previous experience of the industry. His company is a start-up virtual grocery shop with a business model unattainable by the big industry players. The paper reports on the experiences of the company and the outlook of the entrepreneur after two and three years in business, respectively.

With electronic markets emerging on the Internet, the travel agency has been characterized as the most endangered organization in the travel industry as potential travelers now have the opportunity to bypass intermediaries in the distribution chain. Customers are offered good opportunities for convenient and inexpensive travel bookings on the Internet, but at the same time they face many problems and limitations in this regard. This research empirically examines the issue of self-bookings in travel. It reports on a series of exploratory studies conducted in order to investigate the opportunities offered as well as the problems facing any consumer trying to make his/her own travel reservations over the Internet today, and especially the differences between high-and low-complexity bookings in this regard. Four hypotheses were uncovered that relate to the issue of the complexity of the booking task, all emanating from the intuitively realistic supposition that low-complexity travel arrangements are better suited for direct distribution over the Internet than high-complexity arrangements. Using reservation and survey data from samples of students, nearly all of which were experienced Internet users, little support was found for the hypothesized relationships. Disintermediation Travel industry Electronic markets Online reservations Computerized reservations system (CRS) User interface provides unprecedented opportunities for tourism distribution, as there are few other economic activities where the generation, gathering, processing, application, and communication of information is so important for day-today operations. As has been pointed out by, for example, Holloway (1983) and Delaney-Smith (1987), the travel industry is one of the most obvious beneficiaries of technology, and indeed, the travel industry 4

No abstract