Den Digitala teknikens påverkan på resebranschen och dess marknadsföring

The intention of this essay has been to investigate how the new digital technology has affected the tourism industry and marketing, as well as how travel agents and tour operators adapt to this. We also aimed to get a broader view of how the future might look like when it comes to marketing and virtual service landscapes. We decided to base our research according to these following four questions: What affect travel agents’ way of adoption to the technical development? What purposes do the travel agents have for building up their virtual service landscape? How much does the travel agents emphasize on digital marketing? What can travel agents do to better adapt to the technological development in the future? We have chosen to use a qualitative research for this essay. The reason for choosing a qualitative research was to gain a wider understanding that would represent a big part of the changes of technology development. We have thus accomplished a total of seven semi-structured interviews with travel agents of different sizes and a travel bureau that all have relevant knowledge in the subject area. The research also includes two external interviewees’ perspectives, which have characterized the empirical study with a broader perspective on the digital technologies and the travel industry. The most important conclusions we can draw from the research and analysis is that the technology development has a great impact on today’s society. More services, products and so on can be found on the Internet. Physical stores are being replaced with virtual service landscapes, which are supposed to simulate a physical store as much as possible. The Internet is also a new marketing channel which allows pretty much everyone to be very creative to a smaller amount of cost. In the future we believe that relationship marketing will play a bigger part in society as well as for social media