Services marketing: tourism business developing and internet

In the last decades, a lot of changes have occured in a tourism sector. World Tourism Organization (WTO) tourism development forecast in the various regions of the World also let us foresee the tendencies of Lithuanian tourism service. Resent use of E-commerce have made significant changes in the market and services. The number of internet users are continuously increasing, computers become essential part almost in every household. Therefore, consumers who want to save their time and money are looking for the information on the internet sites. This has became a new challenge for tourism organizations, travel agencies, airlines, drivers (State Departament of Tourism, 1999; World Tourism Organization, 2006). In nowdays, European and Lithuanian tourism companies place a significant meaning on the service marketing tools usage. The main point becomes, what the potential customers would like to buy, not what the businesmen want to sell. It is important to perform market research and to understand the customers , while using various market research methods. The importance of the customer needs research, tools of marketing to form the needs of the customer is often underestimated. This work is based on a science literature and articles, the tourism marketing tools are studied, while developing tourism business on the internet in Lithuania. It is essential to understand the needs of customers, tourism market, the attitude of the State , especially when facing the big competition in tourism area. The target of this work is to perform a research on the specifics of service marketing while developing tourism business with a help of internet. Main tasks: 1. To define the theorical aspects of tourism and service marketing 2. To define the aspects of selection of customers regarding their gender and educational level 3. To examine the abilities to choose tourism services using internet. Results. The most of respondents (60% women and 49,1% men) mostly go on holiday 1 time per year and mostly in the summer. For holiday abroad, 30,7% of women and 29,1% of men leave Lithuania. Men tend to spend more money for traveling than women. Respondents mostly tend to chose recreational travelings ( 64,0% women and 61,8% men). Most of the information is found on the internet by 28,4% woman and 30,9% men. More than half of the respondents brows the internet practically every day (57,3% woman, 56,4% men). Women tend to brows the internet at work ( 46,7%) and men at home (56,4%). Buying online is not very popular among the respondents (6,7% women and 14,5% men). Respondents with high education tend to browse the internet more often than the ones who have secondary education. Respondents having higher education and incomplete higher education buy online more often. There is a clear tendency of e-commerce in tourism sector. While information technologies are developing faster and faster, the number of internet users are increasing as well. E-promotion takes more important role in a traditional promotion. As the results of the research revealed, internet is one of the most important tools for tourism information