A Proposed Framework for E-Commerce Usage and Competitive Advantage on Small and Medium Tourism Enterprises (SMTES) in Lebanon

Abstract

E-commerce has tremendous potential for creating business opportunities, tourism as information intensive industry can gain important synergies from the use of e-commerce. Small and medium sized tourism enterprises should take advantage of the e-commerce and refocus their business strategies to maintain their competitiveness in order to avoid being replaced. This paper discusses the current literature on the e-commerce usage and competitive advantage in small and medium tourism enterprises (SMTEs), and proposes a conceptual framework to be tested in the context of Lebanon. This paper adopted a content analysis to examine number of articles that were published by major tourism and e-commerce usage journals. This paper provides a conceptual framework, which mainly based on the e-commerce readiness model, which has been used to assess the e-commerce usage at firms’ level. Also provides a revised ICDT model to explore how tourism enterprises are exploiting the internet spaces and to measure the level of sophisticated use of internet among tourism SMEs. This paper improves knowledge on how small tourism enterprises exploit Internet spaces (ICDT) to improve their competitiveness.