Evaluating the information systems integration maturity level of travel agencies

Abstract

Travel agencies are the mediators of the tourism industry supplying travellers with various choices to their where, when and how questions. With the digitalization of the purchasing environment, the appropriate use of integrated information systems will aid travel agencies in sustaining their place within the tourism industry. There is a lack of comprehensive measure to assess the integration maturity level of information systems (ISs) of travel agencies. Therefore, a maturity model built specifically for tourism agencies is needed to understand how well they are incorporating ISs into their operations. The purpose of this study is to provide a maturity model including important items that can be used for the assessment of travel agencies under the four domains of integration and subsequently evaluate the integration maturity level of Turkish travel agencies’ ISs. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, there are no studies that evaluate the level of ISs integration of travel agencies. Therefore, it can be said that this is the first study to evaluate the integration maturity of travel agencies and provide a general maturity model for ISs within the tourism industry.