A study of e-commerce applications adoption in Iranian tourist organizations

Iran possesses a rich range of natural, cultural, and manmade tourism resources much of which is unique in the world and which constitutes its tourism resource base. Tourism is the fastest growing industry around the world which has the highest share in countries’ GDPs and this is a unique opportunity for Iran. Additionally, tourism is the only industry that has accepted e-commerce with open arms. While business and stock market expectations have not been fulfilled, online transactions in the travel and tourism industry are continuously increasing. This industry is the leading application in the B2C (business-to-consumer) arena. Whereas other industries are displaying a stronger hold to traditional processes, the tourism industry is witnessing an acceptance of ecommerce to the extent that the entire industry structure is changing. The Web is used not only for information gathering, but also for ordering services. A new type of user is emerging, one who acts as his or her own travel agent and builds a personalized travel package. This research focuses on evaluating the current status of Iranian tourist organization websites in order to study the adoption of e-commerce applications on them. A website evaluation model is used to reveal the status of the tourist organizations to find out their reasons for having web presence. Iran’s tourism competitive advantages and weaknesses have also been studied. Based on this, the weak pints of the websites and the potentials which are missed are extracted to help managers enhance their e-commerce activities in Iran’s tourism industry.Validerat; 20101217 (root