| After three decades of development, China's tourism industry has reached paramount achievements. The Chinese tourism industry has entered into the mass tour era that is characterized by individual tours and Do-It-Yourself tours. With the vigorous development of the Chinese tourism industry, and strong growth and applications of the Internet technology, online tourism services become the most vibrant and fastest-growing business line. The opening of the Grand China Travel in 1997 marked the beginning of China's tourism information shifting to online. In 1999, Ctrip's appearance as one of its kind at that time was a milestone of the China's online tourism services providing, followed by many online travel services that have sprung up one after another. After a decade of development, currently there are tens of thousands of active online travel service providers in the market. The scale of online tourism business has grown and business models have been innovated. The online travel business has been constantly changing the pattern and modes of the tourism business development and yielding more powerful influence over the tourism industry.Under the background of the booming online travel services, this study focuses on business model of online travel services. Through examining a variety of online marketing practices, the study expects to reveal the development law for the Chinese online tourism business modes and identify their future trends. The study consists in the following chapters:Chapterâ… : Introduction. This chapter describes the research background, theoretical frameworks, research methods and its implications.Chapterâ…¡: Literature Review. Based on reviewing the current research on classical business modes, online business modes, information technology in the tourism industry, and online travel services, this chapter analyzes the current research situations in those fields, and builds the foundation for this study.Chapterâ…¢: Concepts Delimitation. This chapter reviews the current concepts in online travel service provider research and identifies their components. Based on the reviews, the chapter then categorizes the different business modes and characteristics.Chapterâ…£: Theoretical Foundation. This chapter reviews the theoretical foundations, including information economy, theory of network economy, Adam Smith-Younger theory, the theory of technology innovation, the theory of value chain and models of competitive forces.Chapterâ…¤: Development Process. This Chapter reviews the development history and evolution process of online travel service business models. It retraces the logic process from the EDI era, the CRS era, the GDS era, and the Internet era, with emphasis on the developments of online travel services in the US, Europe, Pan-Asia and China. Chapterâ…¥: The Dynamic Mechanism and evolutionary model. This chapter discusses the driving forces for development of online travel services, including the advance of the tourism industry, changes in the travel demand, market mechanism, technological advance, and policy guidance. It then proposes the modes of online travel services, and analyzes the structure and reconstruction law of the business modes.Chapterâ…¦: Empirical Research. This chapter comparatively studies five different international and national online travel services from four analytical dimensions: the value of objects, products and services, profit models and resource allocation, and then unveil their unique characteristics and successes.Chapterâ…§: Future Trends. Based on the analyses, this chapter explores the future trend of online travel service development.Chapterâ…¨: Conclusion and OutlookThe main innovations of this study are:First, it systematically reviews the business mode development of online travel services,Second, it proposes the concept of the business mode of online travel services and its components,Third, it builds the models of systematic online travel business modes, which has the implication of practical guidance.
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