E-tourism plays a pivotal role in delivering services to tourists by enhancing travel experiences. While small tourism service providers in the developed economies can efficiently take advantage of e-tourism by partnering with global online platforms such as TripAdvisor or Booking.com, small tourism service providers in developing countries often struggle to reach global markets due to factors that are unique to the country they operate in. The aim of this study, therefore, is to identify the key barriers and motivators of e-tourism adoption for small and medium tourism enterprises (SMTEs) in developing countries. Nepal is selected as the case study due to its enormous tourism potential that is plagued by typical challenges. Based on the 'Technology, Organization and Environment (TOE)' framework and 'e-readiness' model, this study identified ten key factors that affect e-tourism adoption by SMTEs in Nepal. A mixed-method approach, using interviews with seven key stakeholders and a survey with 198 SMTEs, were employed for data collection and validation of the proposed factors. Finally, an e-tourism adoption model highlighting the barriers and motivators for e-tourism by SMTEs is presented. This research found that e-tourism adoption by SMTEs in Nepal is affected by environmental factors related to national infrastructure, market size, country-specific contextual factors and organizational factors comprising e-tourism awareness, ICT resources, value proposition, and top management support. This study offers implications for policy and practice towards effective e-tourism adoption in other developing countries.

Developing countries lack e-tourism competencies despite attractive destinations to offer. Nepal is one of the developing countries with its natural beauty and diverse cultural heritage that has great tourism potential. This research is aimed at identifying barriers of e-tourism adoption in developing countries, using Nepal as a case study. Based on the Technology, Organization and Environment (TOE) and e-readiness models, and our literature review, we propose ten factors that affect e-tourism adoption. We applied mixed methods to validate these factors using seven interviews with relevant stakeholders and a survey of 198 tourism organisations in Nepal. The results demonstrate that e-tourism adoption is affected by environmental factors such as lack of national infrastructure, market size, and country-specific contextual factors. Similarly, organizational factors include lack of e-tourism awareness, lack of resources, low value proposition and limited top management support. Finally, we discuss these factors and its implication to policy and practice.

Although Nepal has tremendous tourism opportunities, the small and medium tourism enterprises (SMTEs) that constitute the largest percentage of tourism service providers, are lagging behind in e-tourism adoption. This research conducts a comprehensive analysis of existing literature to propose an e-tourism adoption model based on the Technology-Organisation-Environment and e-readiness models. This model is supported by empirical data using qualitative in-depth interviews with seven key stakeholders and quantitative survey with 198 SMTEs. An operational model is outlined to identify the barriers and motivators for e-tourism adoption in Nepal. Implications of this model for key stakeholders such as the government, tourism organisations and tourism associations are discussed. As Nepal moves to a federal political structure, the findings and recommendation from this research are expected to help policy makers, tourism associations and SMTEs to develop specific e-tourism based programs in order to provide superior services to tourists.

DNA barcoding is an emerging tool for species identification that uses internationally agreed protocols and regions of DNA to create a global database of living organisms. Initiatives are taking place to generate DNA ba rcodes for all groups of living organisms make these genomic identity publically available to understand, conserve, and utilize the world 's biodiversity. Most of the terrestrial plants are characterized using two section of coding region within chloplast, part of chloroplast gene, a more conserved rbcl and more polymorphic MatK gene. In order to create high quality databases, each plants are characterized not only with the rbcl and MatK DNA sequences, an additional sequence information from internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region is more efficient. The quality of barcode depends on the various factors such as efficient primers, purity of DNA templates, as well as the quality of PCR amplicon from which the sequence data will derive. The protocol described here led to the generation of high efficient PCR amplicon which will aid in the minimization of erroneous DNA sequence infonnation from which bioinformatics procedure will generate efficient barcodes. The primers used to amplified MatK, rbcl and ITS sequence were MatK-4 13f-1 and MatK- 1227r-1, rbcl-1F and rbcl-724R, ITS1 and ITS4 showed a strong amplification successes of 80% of each in the tasted medicinal plants of Nepal. This study propose that the used sets of primers and amplification condition will help, in part, the development of DNA barcode for medicinally important plants of Nepal to conserve their identity with its nativeness.

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