The Need for an E-Commerce Platform for India

Abstract

Tourism and technology are synonymous with each other. There is no operation in the tourism industry which so far has not been technologically driven. The Ministry of Tourism (MoT), Government of India launched an ecommerce platform on July 25, 2007 in collaboration with Eviivo, a UK based online solution provider. This allowed domestic and international tourists to access information and book facilities online. The existence of a search engine on the home page of incredibleindia.org facilitated information search and upon selection, online booking facilities helped customers to book accommodation facilities. However, various tourism associations opposed the move of the MoT, Govt. of India. The associations, under the banner of a joint action group, demanded withdrawal of the e-commerce platform and cancellation of the appointment of Eviivo, UK. Subsequently, the government withdrew the decision owing to the pressure of the associations. As a result, the incredibleindia.org site at present does not have any flash banner for online booking. However, any such decisions of withdrawal or approval should be based on some survey and research. In this regard, in the present article the perception of operators as well as perspective tourists have been studied. The samples of operators and tourists in the Union Territory of Puducherry were selected as per the convenience of the researcher. The data collected through structured questionnaire were compared based on the Student’s T-test. The findings present the existence of significant difference between the operators and perspective tourists on the issues related to information search and property management solutions whereas there is no difference of perception of tourists as well as operators on issues such as online booking and payment gateway services, online market place for buyers and sellers and online marketing. Thus, the samples in Puducherry seem to have supported the move to have an e-commerce platform of the entire country as opposed to the move of their associations at national level. The findings have been substantiated with the related literature in the field