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Seminar paper from the year 2013 in the subject Tourism - Hotel Management, grade: 1,0, Stralsund University of Applied Sciences, course: Hotel Management, language: English, abstract: Nowadays the Internet is the most important source of information and the main channel for buying products. With more than 2.4 billion Internet users worldwide (Internet World Stats, 2012) and the highest population penetration in regions that are most relevant for tourism (see figure 1), it seems obvious, that the internet has been changing the sector in a crucial way since the 1980s and is still gaining importance. Therefore it "can be considered as one of the most influential technologies that changes the behavior of tourists" (Crnojevac, Gugic & Karlovcan, 2010: 41). While nowadays about 33% of all hotel rooms are booked via the Internet (Ricca, 2011) there is also a trend in the direction of booking directly on hotel websites. Efficiency, quality and flexibility convince the tourists, although still quite a large number of them ends up actually buying the product or service offline and only using the Internet as a platform for information exchange. But modern technology has not only changed the tourist's behavior (for example the online search process also becomes longer and longer due to the great number of websites), but also the way tourism product and service providers organize and plan their marketing and communication strategies as well as how they adapt to constant changes in the needs of customers (Crnojevac, Gugic & Karlovcan, 2010). [...]
