Dominance of Tourism Marketing Channels in the Global Travel and Tourism Industry: A Financial Market Perspective

As tourism services markets expand and become more and more complex and uncertain, there is growing recognition that competitive advantage of marketing channels rely not only on superior channel commitment and performance, but also on instant accessibility through mobile devices and user-friendly applications that cancel anachronistic terms such as limitations of place and time. The rapid developments of Information Communication Technologies (ICT) on Tourism Distribution Channels have a great impact on worldwide tourism and hospitality industry with significant effect on the dealings between the members of the channels. Vital factors such as power, roles and influences change unpredictable causing confusion to several of the tourism stakeholders. The purpose of the present paper is to examine the case of increasing dominance of the Online Tour Operators on traditional tourism producers (hospitality industry) by comparing their share prices’ returns. In order to achieve this aim, we employ the Dynamic Conditional Correlation (DCC) model to examine dynamic correlations between the major Online Tour Operators’ and big capitalization Hotel Groups’ returns. The primary purpose of this article is to expand the understanding of industry practitioners as well as to academic researchers interested in tourism distributions marketing channels.