The pros and cons of digital marketing strategies: applications from the hotel industry

Abstract

The tourism industry is known to be one of the first service industries to adapt and use information and communication technologies (ICT) for promoting its services (Sadr, 2013). In the early stage of the mainframe age in 1950s, flight booking systems went online from traditional manual booking system and in early 2000s, the advance of web-based technologies led to the emergence of e-Tourism (Kasahara, Iiyama, & Minoh, 2017). ICT and Internet are partly applied for practical purposes such as travel planning, booking, and payment of tourism products (Hyde,2008). This chapter discusses the pros and cons of digital marketing strategies applied in the hotel industry.