Journal of Marketing Management

ICT And New Trends In Consumer Behavior - New Experiential Knowledge, Opportunities or Challenges for Intermediaries
Iris Mihajlović

Abstract
This paper emphasizes on the research of trends in the behaviour of tourists when organizing travels, from the possibilities of using new forms of communication, innovative tools that subjects should implement in their businesses. In order to gain insight how changes in behaviour of tourists, when selecting the travel organization modality, affect the customization of intermediaries using new technologies to the European tourist market, the secondary research was conducted. Tourists, who participated in the survey, were asked to indicate which mode of the travel organization had been used according to demographic characteristics of respondents, their country of origin, including all 27 EU Member States. This paper studies the level and the forms of using of new technologies, as the channel or the innovative tools that intermediaries use. Survey results indicate an increasing trend of independent travel organization, the considerably less evident of tourists interest for travel agency services or to completely organized forms of travel. The personalization of services represents the obstacle faced by intermediaries. Recognizing it as a serious threat, tour operators provide the tourists a level of personalized services and the flexibility, using of new tools (dynamic packages) that tourists choose services by integrating them into packages.

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