Slovenian Tourism Industry: E-disabled?

Abstract

The immersive power of Internet and the ability to conduct on-line business marks a line between failure and success. The objective of this paper is to determine whether there are any factors that can be related to the web presence of entities active in Slovenian tourism. Such factors would help to identify the key issues for improving the web presence of Slovenian tourism entities. A list of 2181 entities representing the population of active business units in the Slovenian tourism industry was obtained from Telecom Slovenia’s online service www.bizi.si. The units were considered to be active in the tourism sector if their primary code belonged to the following group: i 55.10, i 55.20, i 55.30, i 56.10, n 79.11, h 49.39, n 77.34, or r 93.292. Each entity’s presence on the Internet by means of a web page address was checked. Statistical analyses (associations, simple logistic regression, decision trees) were performed to verify associations or relations between web presence and other data on companies.

Of the 2181 entities, only 655 are present on the Internet by means of a web page. As expected, companies with more employees are more web-present than those with fewer; with two or more employees, the web presence exceeds 60. Small firms, newly established ones, or those with few employees tend not to have web pages; the worrying fact is that there is a considerable number of companies still without a web page despite having an adequate annual income. The analysis has exposed the astonishing fact that many Slovenian companies in the tourism sector are not present on the Internet. Even some larger firms do not have a web page. This fact shows that Slovenian tourism entities are lagging behind global trends and that significant efforts need to be put into ict and the e-enabling of Slovenian tourism sector.

Keywords: ict in tourism, web presence, tourism industry, technologies