Effect of e-business adoption on relationship quality in travel agency–supplier relationship: A perspective of supply chain management

Abstract

The emergence of e-business (the business of buying and selling goods and services on the Internet) has created a new business paradigm, which impacts marketing channels of the service industry, including tourism. The perspectives of e-business from the supply chain management (SCM) point of view are receiving considerable attention. In the past, research about SCM focused mainly on international transportation and trading of tangible goods. There was little research about the service business. Thus, this research aims to study the tourism industry as one of the service businesses which is growing the fastest around the world. Moreover, the internet plays a vital role in tourism. Therefore, academic research can benefit firms in the tourism sector. The main objective is to examine the e-business factors which have the greatest impact on the travel agency supplier. This research applied quantitative methods to examine whether antecedent factors including customer pressure and normative pressure, pose on impact on e-business in forms of e-communications, e-payment and e-procurement or not when the e-business factors, affect the quality of the relationship between travel agencies and their suppliers. The structured interview was employed at the samples’ workplaces. The samples were 409 retail travel agencies in Thailand selected by stratified sampling method. The conceptual model was described by path analyses using SEM technique. For the travel agencies, customer pressure yielded the greatest impact on e-payment, whereas normative pressure created the most impact on e-procurement. Both customer and normative pressures influenced the travel agencies’ short-term trust with their suppliers; however, the latter created greater impact. In addition, e-business adoption caused impact on the agencies’ short-term trust toward the suppliers. Interestingly, the research findings unexpectedly revealed that e-payment was a key factor which contributed to building agencies’ short-term trust with their suppliers.