E-Business Adoption, Use, and Value Creation: An Austrian Hotel Study

This article presents an approach describing how contextual conditions, like infrastructural, organizational, as well as environmental factors, determine e-business adoption and use and, in turn, positively affects value creation processes in hotel businesses. The research is grounded in Innovation Diffusion Theory and is empirically based on surveys undertaken in the Austrian hotel sector. Based upon Zhu and Kraemer's e-business impact model, data are analyzed by linear structural equation models and logistic regression. Results show that e-business adoption and related use intensity decisions in the hotel sector are affected by the availability of a modern ICT system, firm size, as well as management's conviction that core business processes are supported by information technologies and, that tourists and cooperation partners expect the latest information technologies. It was further found that online platforms are the most important e-business application for value creation in the three-star hotel segment. By contrast, in the four- and five-star hotel segment a property management system, a website with booking functionality, and e-mail marketing are crucial e-business applications for value creation.