A Study of Influencing Traditional Travel Agencies' Decision Making to Introducing B2C E-commerce

Before the emerging of Internet, traditional travel agencies had been an industry that adopted information technology greatly, and common for each travel agency to have Computerized Reservation System to connect with airlines and hotels through dedicated lines. This kind of inter-organizational information system has been adopted for years; while viewing the travel industry as a whole, the changes on value chain and competition and cooperation relation are caused by the commercial behavior of Internet, E-commerce (EC). Therefore, the objectives of this study are: to understand the influence of top managements’ characteristics on introducing B2C EC, to understand the influence of travel agencies’ attributes on introducing B2C EC, and to understand the decision-making factors travel agencies considered while introducing B2C EC. To the data analysis, we adopt scale reliability analysis, scale validity analysis, descriptive statistics, chi-square test, independent sample t-test, Pearson’s correlation analysis, factor analysis and discriminated analysis, etc. According to the analysis results, this study found that “education level”, “job position”, “consuming experience in EC websites”, and “viewpoint on EC prospective” of the top management’s characteristics would directly influence the introduction of e-commerce and have positive correlation with the decision significantly; the travel agency’s attributes of “type of travel agency”, “company’s age”, “number of employees” and “participating in the promotion and assistance measure” would directly influence whether to introduce e-commerce or not, and the decision is positively correlated with significance of EC introduction. Decision factors are divided into six dimensions, “Product Competence”, “Relationship of Investment Capital”, “E-business’ Level”, “Consumers Demand”, “E-commerce Environment”, and “Management Knowledge Mode”. Results show that the dimension “E-business’ Level” affects the most and dimension “Relationship of Investment Capital” affects next the decision to introducing EC.