The OTAs' Websites: The Opinion of Generation Y Leads to Organizational Change

IntroductionAccording to Phocuswright (2014) websites of tourism providers accounted for 62% of total online sales in 2014, while online intermediates generated 38%. It is anticipated that this share will remain stable during 2015. Websites of tourism products' providers, led by airlines, dominate the vast majority of the market. However, it is expected Online Travel Agencies (hereafter OTAs) to stop this trend in the next three years. Although OTAs do not dominate in any region of the world, the largest proportion of OTAs are registered in Eastern Europe (50%), followed by Latin America (41%) (Phocuswright, 2014). Trends show that OTAs are on the raise. Since websites have been their main tools in attaining the leading position on the online marketplaces it is crucial to understand how their web strategies are performing and to adopt their operations accordingly.The goal of the paper was to highlight the characteristics of websites that are more important when buying travel products and to draw attention to common web marketing mistakes of OTAs according to generation Y. The purpose of the paper was to enlighten that online marketing orientation is not referred to a few sections of a company, even a dot.com one, but it is rather a mindset that should trigger also organizational changes in order to contribute to the overall improvement of the web site quality and support the efficiency of online marketing process. The main hypothesis states that in order to gain the goal of direct online sales, OTAs should also organize themselves accordingly to target (future) customers' (Generation Y) needs and requirements. The main research method used in the study included an online survey. Statistical methods were used to analyze the data.The paper is composed of five parts. After introduction, in the theoretical review the focus is on tourism websites, needed organizational change and generation Y. Following the literature review, website evaluation methods and frameworks used in the research are reviewed and explained in the Section 3. Section 3 also presents the research methods used in the study as well as the research results. The respondents' satisfaction is assessed by observing five categories: look & feel, usabilit y, technical performance and accessibility, balance of motivational and informative content and trust & identity. Authors conclude with Section 5.Theoretical ReviewWebsites Analyses in TourismWhen travelling and searching for their preferred travel destinations, Europeans mostly rely on the information provided online. This is why online content exceeded all other forms of traditional media and marketing as reported by Oxford Economics Company - Tourism Economics (2013). Although being important, European tourists like to hear opinions of their friends and relatives. So, their recommendations are mostly taken into account. This brings into question whether the distinction between online content and recommendations of friends and relatives is really becoming much less clear nowadays as concluded in the report "The impact of Online Content of European Tourism by Tourism Economics (2013). Travel agencies have a high conversion rate from online activities with 45% selling online generating 32% of the sect or's turnover in the EU. (Tourism Economics, 2013) The online technology has been influencing strongly the relationship between tourism demand and tourism supply. The particular influence of online technology has been noted between tourists and travel agencies since the level of information than can be put and looked for online can vary based on the quality of the web content, its effectiveness, usability, trust etc.There are various researches on the key factors affecting the success of websites. This is due to the lack of clear criteria for objectively assessing the performance of tourism company's website. The first study of such kind appeared 16 years ago - in 1999. …