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The Internet is bot an opportunity and a challenge for hotel marketers. The opportunity lies is reaching customers directly through internet sites. The challenge is to the guest's attention long enough to tell your story.
The internet allows potential customers to learn about and tour hotel facilities and to compare prices without directly interacting with a hotel's representatives. For some customers, it is the first and only channel consulted when booking hotel accommodations. As software improves and the speed of telecommunications picks up, an increasing number of guests will use this channel. Thus, the internet represents a promising distribution channel for the hospitality industry. In this article we examine the nature of the internet, its relationship to a hotel's global distribution system (GDS), and the possibilities for using the internet as part of a GDS.
First-hand. As part of the research for this article we conducted several interviews with hotel companies, switch companies, and vendors.We conducted the interviews on the condition that the respondents not be named. The interviews, using both unstructured and semistructured questions, involved the following issues: the booking process, costs of distribution, share of distribution by channel, information technology infrastructure, developments or company initiatives underway in the area of GDS, the future outlook of GDSs and hotel technology, incentives used to encourage consumer use of one channel over others, issues related to distribution and hotel technology, the role of intermediaries, comparisons between the reservations process for luxury hotels and other segments, and the potential competitive advantage from technology.
Slow start. Businesses posted their early web pages with caution. Those first home pages were little more than electronic brochures, now referred to as "brochureware." Since that tentative start, businesses in all industries have embraced the internet as a way to reach consumers and transact business. According to an Information Week survey of chief information officers (CIOs), which tracks information technology use and spending in top firms worldwide, the internet now is considered a technology asset because of its ability to disseminate large volumes of information quickly and efficiently to employees, customers, shareholders, and suppliers.1 This survey reported that members of the InformationWeek 500 spent, on average, 3 percent (or $6 million) of their 1996 information systems budgets on internet and new-media initiatives.