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Advances in information communication technologies (ICTs) have changed the tourism distribution channels model, as traditional players continue to disappear or change their business model, while new players and channels emerge because of technological developments. Therefore, this study aims to propose a tourism distribution channels model for European island destinations.

Using an exploratory approach, interviews with 34 tourism stakeholders were conducted at ITB Berlin and WTM London in March 2014 and March/November 2016, and analyzed using thematic analysis.

The findings revealed that a number of changes have taken place within the distribution channels market over the past six years. The disappearance of incoming travel agents has increased, while new forms of online communication and distribution have appeared. In particular, social media, online review sites and mobile channels play an increasingly important role for hoteliers.

ICTs change the online landscape for tourist distribution in island destinations, and practitioners should make use of new online channels and be aware of disappearing tourism players to remain competitive.

First, this paper provides indications for the increased disintermediation in regard to incoming travel agents within the Cretan hospitality and tourism industry. Second, it investigates the issue of tourism distribution channels using a broad range of key tourism and hospitality players to provide a tourism distribution channels model for future reference. Finally, this study offers implications for the development of distribution strategies for tourism businesses and hoteliers in Crete.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the evolution and transformation of tourism distribution channels, focusing on the role the internet has played in such a process. It attempts to graphically illustrate, in a temporal manner, the evolving complexity of the tourism distribution systems.

This paper provides insights into the change of the structure of tourism distribution that has not been extensively explored. Indeed, the complexity of the tourism distribution structure has been diagrammatically depicted multiple times by previous researchers and each depiction has contributed to a fuller understanding of the body of knowledge by focusing on different aspects of that structure. This paper builds upon those valuable knowledge contributions by focusing on the evolution of the structure over time, systematically and diagrammatically revealing the progressively larger number of intermediation layers, in spite of concurrent disintermediation and reintermediation activity. This paper does not focus on every action of every participant in detail, but rather focuses on categories of intermediaries, looking at pioneering examples of each. Likewise, the comparative rates of technology adoption in different regions of the world are not investigated.

The complex network proposed in this paper indicates that the advance of information and communication technology has not reduced the number of intermediaries in the distribution channel, but rather resulted in an increasingly complex array of intermediaries. The structure of the tourism industry has taken the form of a complex global network. In the struggle to prosper in this environment, participants at various levels will continue to compete, cooperate, merge, form partnerships, and change relationships on a regular basis.

The extant literature has covered many aspects of intermediation, disintermediation, and reintermediation, albeit with differing terminologies. Most of these studies have adopted a static and cross‐sectional approach in examining the structure and use of tourism distribution channels. This paper examines the historical evolution and progression of tourism distribution channels which is not only important in understanding where we are now as an industry, but also where we came from and where we are heading to.

This study aims to examine online room rates in Hong Kong hotels. It focuses on comparing and contrasting the lowest hotel room rates that are available to customers.

Eight distribution channels and 45 hotels in Hong Kong were examined for online room rates in a 13‐month period from 2005 to 2006. The eight distribution channels represented different nature of operations including both indirect and direct distribution channels.

Empirical findings showed the web sites of local travel agents and local reservation agents offered the lowest online room rates, and that indirect distribution channels offered lower room rates than direct distribution channels.

A major limitation of this study is the geographic limitation of hotel selection.

Findings of the study are expected to provide insights for hoteliers to refine their online room rate strategy.

The purpose of this paper is to reexamine several issues about disintermediation from the perspectives of tourism product/service suppliers (hotels) and traditional intermediaries (travel agencies), considering the move of the current distribution landscape toward disintermediation. Internet and mobile technologies offer various tools for consumers to search and purchase products/services from suppliers directly. Consequently, the necessity and role of traditional intermediaries in the industry become questionable.

In all, six focus group interviews were conducted to collect primary data from ten managers of three traditional travel agencies and 11 managers from three business hotels in Hong Kong, which is a major travel destination in Asia with many world-class hotels and tourism facilities.

Despite their different business backgrounds, the interviewees agreed on the increasing importance of Internet technology in the distribution of tourism products. The interviewees also posited that traditional travel agencies are still needed to serve certain customer groups, albeit their role may have little importance.

Practitioners should adapt to technologically induced changes to remain competitive in the e-business era.

This paper provides several original contributions. First, this paper supplements the extant literature by revealing how modern practitioners perceive disintermediation in the tourism and hospitality industry. Second, this paper is the first to investigate the disintermediation issue from the perspectives of tourism product/service suppliers and intermediaries. Finally, this paper provides a reference for industry practitioners to establish adequate strategies that take advantage of Internet technology.

This paper aims to focus on the reason why hoteliers choose to be present in online travel agent (OTA) and social media web sites for sales purposes. It also investigates the technological and human factors related to these two practices.

The research is based on a survey sent to a wide range of hotels in a Swiss touristic region. The empirical analysis involves the specification of two ordered logit models exploring the importance (in terms of online sales) of both social media and the online travel agent, Booking.com.

Findings highlight the constant tension between visibility and online sales in the web arena, as well as a clear distinction in social media and OTA web site adoption between hospitality structures using online management tools and employing personnel with specific skills.

The research highlights the need for the hospitality industry to maintain an effective presence on social media and OTAs in order to move towards the creation of a new form of social booking technologies to increase their visibility and sales.

This research contributes to understanding the major role played by OTAs and social media in the hospitality industry while underlining the possibility of a major interplay between the two.

Corporate travel represents a significant source of revenue for the tourism industry. Therefore, the quality of service is essential for maintaining and expanding corporate cliental bases. Despite the importance, the extant literature has yet sufficiently examined corporate travel service quality (SQ) and its impact. To make up for the drawback, this study aims to differentiate the impact of SQ perceptions on customer satisfaction between the online and off-line contexts through an empirical investigation in one of the top five corporate travel agencies in North America.

The well-established SERVQUAL measurement is applied in differentiating the impact of SQ dimensions between the online and off-line context. To empirically test the proposed corporate travel agency (CTA) SQ conceptual model, a set of survey data of “Welcome Back Survey” from HRG (a top five CTA in North America) was examined.

The study finds that for online services, assurance, responsiveness and empathy affect perceived SQ, whereas for off-line services, assurance, empathy and tangible are the three dimensions of perceived SQ.

By relying on the existing survey, the off-line context has one less dimension than the online context. Yet as an early effort in differentiating the differences in the impact of SQ between two service contexts, the study offers insightful findings.

The findings will be helpful for business managers of CTAs to identify the factors that influence SQ in both online booking and off-line booking context. In particular, assurance and empathy are two dimensions that exert a significant impact on customer satisfaction.

This paper is the first to compare the differences of the SQ of online and off-line corporate travel.

Because of the amount of data and multimedia content available, searching the Web is a monumental task. Online commercial sites are growing, and travel is the fastest growing segment of online commerce, with no sign of slowing down. This article presents a selected list of travel sites to help librarians, and the traveling public, locate information to fit their needs. The sites are arranged in ten major categories: megasites, practical matters, lodging and restaurants, budget travel, specialty travel, transportation, maps, regional/country/city‐specific links, the travel business, and travelogues/current news/journal articles.

The purpose of this paper is to develop and validate a scale to measure customer social participation in brand communities, specifically e-travel companies’ communities.

A qualitative research has been undertaken to generate a pool of items. Based on Churchill’s (1979) scale development process, numerous reliability and validity tests have been conducted to confirm the scale structure. Data were collected through online and field surveys from the students and hotel guests who have either subscribed, liked or joined any e-travel service companies’ community brand page using any social networking site or have ever posted or considered reviews and ratings of any e-travel service companies via their official site or via a mobile app while planning their travel.

The findings depict nine items on a three-dimensional scale for measuring customer participation in travel brand communities created on social networking sites.

The findings provide important implications for hotel and travel managers and are likely to encourage future studies in the field of social media and travel brand communities.

This paper contributes to the literature by providing refinement to the distinct operationalization and conceptualization of customer online participation, specifically in social media-based travel brand communities. This paper is the first to develop a multidimensional scale of customer social participation in e-travel companies’ communities. This is a new addition to existing literature, as the majority of empirical studies in this field are from participation other than customer social participation and contexts different from e-travel companies.

This study examines whether a higher interest alignment between online travel agencies (OTAs; hosting platform) and hotels (business owners) will intensify review manipulation activities.

With a panel data set collected from a Chinese online travel agency and a travel search engine, the authors develop a matching-based difference-indifference approach to examine the presence of partnership-intensified review manipulation.

The authors find that the ratings of agency's partner hotels (with a higher interest alignment) are abnormally higher than those of matched non-partner hotels (with a lower interest alignment), after they are benchmarked with their ratings on the search engine (without a partnership business model). Further, the analysis results indicate that this partnership-intensified manipulation deteriorates the hotel's sales performance because of damaged customer trust and satisfaction.

Previous studies implicitly assume that review manipulator is independent from the hosting platform. This is the first study examining the role of the hosting platform in review manipulations.

The purpose of this study is to empirically verify the role of determinants of information quality in shaping attitudes and intention of respondents from major metro cities of India towards electronic word of mouth (e-WOM) using personal identifying information (PII) as a moderator.

For the purpose of measuring the role of information quality in predicting attitude towards e-WOM (moderated by PII), the study proposes and validates the research framework by collecting responses from 375 respondents with diverse demographics, belonging to select metro cities of India.

All the constructs of information quality have a significantly positive effect on attitude of travellers towards e-WOM. Attitude further impacts the behavioural intention to book via an online travel agency/agent (OTA). PII successfully moderated all the hypothesized relationships with attitude except review sidedness.

The study offers a rationale to fill the gap between information quality and attitude as well as exploring new relationships using PII as a moderating variable. It further opens new avenues in researching the behavioural intention of travellers from metro cities of India with the disruptions created by Web 2.0.

OTAs in this competitive time must try to harmonize their systems to create content that is timely updated, unique, convincing and useful to build long-term relationships and generate continued revenues.

In the context of OTAs in India, this study has successfully identified the most relevant constructs of information quality and examined their effectiveness in creating a positive attitude towards e-WOM. The use of contemporary construct “PII” as a moderator will help marketers develop effective strategies for reducing anonymity in reviews and capturing the intention of experience-oriented travellers from the metro cities of India.