[Keywords:] E-commerce; Industrial value chain; Tourism value chain
Today's society is entering an era of network economy. The rapid development of computer and network technology has brought historic opportunities for social and economic development. The rise of e-commerce has greatly promoted innovation in business, trade, marketing, finance, advertising, transportation, education and other fields, thus forming a new industry and bringing many new opportunities to enterprises all over the world. The development of e-commerce has also brought changes in the behavior of tourism enterprises, tourism markets and tourism consumers, impacting or affecting the traditional tourism economy and tourism enterprises.
After more than 20 years of development, China has gradually become a major tourist country in the world. At present, the urgent problem for China's tourism industry is how to improve its competitiveness. Industrial value chain is an effective mode to enhance industrial competitiveness in the world at present. In recent years, the development trend of tourism industry value chain has also appeared in many places in China. With the development of modern information technology and the popularization of e-commerce, it has become an important topic in China's tourism academic research to construct the value chain of tourism industry by using network resources.
First, the concept of value chain
(A) industrial value chain
The concept of value chain was first put forward by Michael Porter in his book Competitive Advantage. He believes that "every enterprise is a collection of activities in the process of product design, production, marketing, delivery and assistance. All these activities can be represented by the value chain. A certain level of value chain is a combination of various activities of enterprises in a specific industry. " It is believed that the core competitive advantage of an enterprise lies in the design of the value chain, and the process of value chain transmission is also the process of continuous product appreciation.
Although the value chain proposed by Michael Porter is mainly aimed at the value chain within the enterprise, he also pointed out that the value chain is a series of continuous activities. In fact, his successor, Peter Hines, brought raw material suppliers and customers into the value chain, redefined the value chain as a "transportation line to integrate the value of materials", and regarded customers' demand for products as the end of the production process, and profits as a by-product to meet this goal. In addition, Haynes' value chain emphasizes the cross function of basic activities, such as technology development, production and market, and classifies information technology as auxiliary activities, thus forming an industrial value chain.
The so-called industrial value chain refers to the whole vertical chain consisting of all links of production and processing of a final product from the initial mineral resources or raw materials to the final product reaching consumers. It includes three aspects: first, the industrial value chain is a combination of related materials; Secondly, this combination is not disorderly, but needs to be optimized and upgraded around a core value or technology; Finally, the criteria for determining whether the industrial value chain is optimized should focus on whether the full value of its resources is maximized, that is, whether the optimization criteria focus on "structure" and "dynamics", and the discussion object is "link" rather than "point".
(B) Tourism value chain
According to the concept of industrial value chain, we can define tourism value chain as a series of transmission processes of tourism products from supply to final consumption, which are generally composed of tourism product suppliers, traditional tourism intermediaries or e-commerce tourism intermediaries and tourism consumers.
The tourism value chain includes four links: tourism resources, tourism products, sales channels and tourists. From tourism resources to tourists and back to tourism resources, the value of the value chain increases with the increase of each link, and the final value is realized by tourists. Due to the increase in sales, the investment in marketing channels, products and funds has increased, and the value of the tourism value chain has been further enhanced. Therefore, we regard tourist behavior as the core and starting point of the process of tourism value chain, and the whole value-added process can be summed up as a "demand-supply" process.
Second, the value chain analysis of tourism in the e-commerce environment
(A) the opportunities brought by e-commerce to the tourism industry
The word "e-commerce" has spread with the popularity of the Internet. Tourism is a labor-intensive and information technology-intensive industry. As a kind of intangible tourism activity, the driving force of tourism market circulation is not the physical goods, but the flow of tourists caused by the information transmission of tourism products. From this perspective, the core of tourism circulation is information. The introduction of e-commerce has brought brand-new development opportunities for the development of tourism.
E-commerce has only been used in tourism for a few years, but its development momentum is very strong. E-commerce has become a new mode of tourism transaction in the information age. In 2002, the global tourism e-commerce sales exceeded $63 billion, maintaining a growth rate of more than 350% for five consecutive years. According to the prediction of the World Tourism Organization, in the next five years, tourism e-commerce will account for 25% of all tourism transactions in the world, and the proportion of tourism e-commerce in e-commerce will reach 20% ~ 25%.
Tourism e-commerce websites in China have appeared since 1996. Up to now, there are more than 5,000 websites with certain tourism information capabilities. Among them, there are more than 300 professional travel websites, mainly including regional websites, professional websites and travel channels of portal websites. Regional websites mainly introduce local scenic spots and scenic spots, with poor overall strength and little information, and the benefits are hard to guarantee. Professional travel websites mainly carry out tourism intermediary business, including websites established by traditional travel agencies and professional e-commerce websites. The former includes China Youth Travel Service Network and China Travel Service Network. Kang Hui Travel Agency has also set up the first outbound travel website in China, introducing outbound travel knowledge such as signing up for tours, handling passports, visas, border defense and customs. The latter is Ctrip. Com, e dragon. Com and Huaxia. com。
E-commerce is an important means for China's tourism industry to participate in international competition, and the National Tourism Administration attaches great importance to it. At the end of 2000, the National Tourism Administration launched the Golden Tour Project, one of which is to bring tourism e-commerce into the track of standardization, standardization and systematic planning to support the electronic transformation of domestic tourism enterprises and tourist destinations.
(B) E-commerce on the construction of tourism value chain
1. Traditional tourism value chain
Tourism is characterized by union and cooperation. The traditional tourism value chain starts from the supplier of the destination, passes through the tourism wholesaler, and then is sold by the tourism retailer to the tourists in the source area (see figure 1).
As can be seen from the figure 1, the tourism value chain can be divided into three parts, and the whole value chain is blocky, and each piece is in an obvious linear order state. Independent commercial tourism institutions are the main body of the value chain. All tourism activities are coordinated by tourists, travel agencies, tourism wholesalers, local travel agencies, travel agencies and destination tourism service enterprises, and the whole process has a fixed order, which leads to slow information flow and poor program flexibility in the traditional tourism value chain. This is a fixed chain connected in sequence, just like a biological chain. If one link in the middle is blocked, the whole chain will collapse.
The right branch of the traditional tourism value chain, that is, the main part of the value chain composed of commercial tourism institutions, mainly pays attention to the conclusion of tourism product transactions, but does not care much about the provision of destination tourism information. On the other hand, the branch on the left, composed of destination agencies, is mainly responsible for providing destination tourism information and does not care about tourism transactions. These two parts are obviously separated, and there is little cooperation or mutual linkage. Tourism is an industry with a long distance between production, supply and consumption. On the one hand, tourism consumers do not understand the tourism products and services provided by tourism enterprises; On the other hand, tourism enterprises do not understand the needs of tourism consumers, which leads to information asymmetry and information delay.
2. The construction of tourism value chain in e-commerce environment
The development of network economy redefines the connotation and form of competition and cooperation in all links of tourism value chain. Jefferey F.Rayport and John J.Sviolda put forward the viewpoint of developing virtual value chain in 1995, arguing that every enterprise today is competing in two worlds, namely, the material world that managers can perceive and the virtual world composed of information, and the latter refers to the new value growth point of e-commerce. The value-added processes of the two value chains are basically different. Physical value chain consists of a series of linear and continuous activities, while virtual value chain is nonlinear, with potential input and output points and a matrix that can be obtained and distributed through various channels. E-commerce in tourism has had a great impact on the traditional inter-enterprise value chain. With the establishment of a large number of tourist destination direct selling websites, a number of emerging e-tourism middlemen and professional tourism e-commerce platform websites have emerged. The new tourism value chain takes computer network technology as the platform and the Internet as the medium, which overcomes the disadvantages of the traditional value chain (Figure 2).
The e-commerce environment promotes the networking of the tourism value chain, which is distributed in a network centered on the tourism e-commerce platform and the tourism destination information system, with no obvious sequence, and all parts of the whole chain can cross and cross-link, with fast information transmission and less loss.
Among them, five nodes such as tourists, tourism e-commerce platform and tourism destination information system are directly connected, which makes the past linear information flow become a star structure centered on the above three parts (Figure 3).
The new tourism value chain overcomes the disadvantages of the traditional value chain, but it also shows some new characteristics:
(1) Cooperation dynamics
In the new tourism value chain, each node can reach its destination node in various ways. Therefore, under the condition of high-speed information flow, it is a challenge for every tourism enterprise to find an "ideal" partner and maintain a long-term mutually beneficial cooperative relationship. Obviously, most cooperative relationships in the information space are holistic. With information circulation as a bridge to find the lowest-cost partner, their cooperative relationship can only be maintained until the goals of both parties are realized. Therefore, all kinds of enterprises will constantly "shuttle" in the information space, looking for the right cooperative relationship, the right time and the right market segments and market conditions.
The effective choice of partners directly affects the value-added of tourism value chain. Based on the coordination theory, this paper analyzes the interdependence among enterprises, and from the perspective of the overall optimization of one-way tourism value chain, puts forward the method of selecting the partner combination based on interdependence, so as to improve the compatibility and stability of each node in the tourism value chain.
(2) product customization
With the intervention of e-commerce, tourists or potential tourists can adjust relevant information according to their personal interests and choose personalized and characteristic tourism products. For tourism enterprises, they can obtain more and more comprehensive tourism market information than before, adjust the products sold and the services provided, and provide customized tourism products for specific tourists, thus promoting various innovations in marketing and sales. For example, in the traditional tourism value chain, if tourists want to travel to a certain destination, they must go through travel agencies, travel wholesalers or some tourism organizations, otherwise they can't directly understand the information of the destination and can only choose the tourism products provided by travel agencies. The whole tourism activity is a package service. In the e-commerce environment, tourists can know the destination information through the tourism professional platform and the tourism destination information system, choose their favorite projects, split and reorganize the products provided by travel agents, and experience a kind of ordering service.
(3) diversification of competition
In the e-commerce environment, the rapid flow of information makes the competition among tourism enterprises more intense, from the original simple competition for tourists to the complex competition for information, tourists, markets and other factors, and dynamic cooperation further intensifies this phenomenon.
At the same time, e-commerce also blurs the boundary of the value chain, and competition may also come from outside the value chain. In addition to benefiting from the value chain, some neighboring related enterprises can also establish new product and service flows through the Internet. Internet is not only a channel to directly connect customers or value chain participants, but also a source to enhance their competitiveness.
Third, the conclusion
At present, the new tourism value chain in e-commerce environment is only in the stage of exploration and development. Only by opening cooperation, establishing a dynamic and balanced business value chain model and improving core competitiveness can tourism enterprises at all nodes in the value chain truly profit in the environment of rapid information dissemination and open up a successful market.
At the same time, tourism is a highly information-dependent industry, and the introduction of e-commerce makes the barrier-free and lossless exchange of information a reality, which leads many tourism enterprises to think that information is interest and equate the process of information acquisition with the process of income. In fact, the transmission of tourism business interests is far less smooth than the transmission of network information. The acquisition of tourism commercial interests is a complex and huge process, a highly refined process of information and a coordinated development process led by many factors. Therefore, we should also treat tourism e-commerce rationally.