The challenge facing online booking among local travel agencies in Arusha

Abstract

Whether customers should place their orders be attended face to face or through online systems is a topic that has attracted scholarly and policy attentions all over the world. The purpose is to answer what and how electronic equipment’s may be used to simplify selling and marketing businesses. To the tourism sector, as it is mostly based in Arusha the issue of online bookings among local travel agents is a necessary move for thriving and growth. This is because most of the customers in this sector are from Europe and America whose culture is already electronic use for most activities. Convectional literature on the aspect of online bookings is more based in developed economies than in developing countries. However, contexts such as tourism practice in Tanzania especially in Arusha city are not well fitted into the existing tourism literature. Therefore, the literature lacks empirical evidences on challenges that local travel agents face in their attempts to practice online bookings. That is to say challenges arising from firms’ infrastructural ownership, knowledge and skills among local travel agents and the accessibility of internet to support online bookings are not well addressed. This study assed the challenges facing local travel agents in Arusha City in order to complement the literature. This study is both quantitative and qualitative based. Within the survey of 50 local travel agents in Arusha, two specific companies were interviewed with respect to the research questions to triangulate the results. Questionnaire was used and unstructured interview was conducted targeting only two representatives from the 50 tour and travel agents. Analysis was made using descriptive statistics and multiple linear regression model through SPSS software. Qualitative interviews were written based on the responses in the pre determined themes of discussion. Findings reveal that not all the companies face the same challenges since some of them had no challenge at all. However, the airline sector had challenges related to internet access while the transport agents mostly faced challenges related to computer availability and office locations. It is also noted that almost all the companies complained on the lack of employees with knowledge and skills to handle online bookings. For xiii example, language barrier was observed to be a big problem as some tourists were demanding services from multilingual employees. Government policy with respect to the internet access and use of VPN was also found as a major challenge to almost all the companies. This study recommends that at the firm level, firms should invest more on staff training to get the lacking skills among employees. At the government level, policy on internet access should reflect the needs of the local travel agents such as allowing use of VPN and other features to ensure constant internet access.