Long Tails in the Tourism Industry: Towards Knowledge Intensive Service Suppliers

This paper analyses the effects of the Internet on the organizations and the markets in the tourism industry. It enlightens its deepening impact on incumbent organizations and markets from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 though the analysis of the dynamics of the long tail, i.e. of the distribution of activities in tourism. Innovation is gone from exploitation to exploration of the long tail, towards the emergence of non-profit or for-profit Knowledge Intensive Service Suppliers allowing 'prosumers' to find solutions to run themselves their activities, through users generated resources. Contrasting results appear, the growing autonomy of the tail from the head of distribution in the tourism industry, i.e. the development of global innovative market places inside the long tail itself, but still the reemergence of power laws, of tails within the tails as the basic shapes of activities in this platform economy. Skewed distributions appear indeed as the 'normal' characteristic of the economic activity, the traditional market one as well as the so-called 'sharing' one, which stands as a new form of the globalization.