Marketing Hospitality and Tourism Education on the Internet: An Analysis of e-Relationship Marketing Features

The characteristics of speed, personalization, and interactions make the Internet an ideal tool for enhancing customer relationships. The authors developed an electronic relationship marketing (e-RM) framework and investigated the website features of 91 hospitality and tourism programs in the US. The results indicated that, while there was a preliminary effort of using program websites to facilitate the relationship with prospective students, sophisticated utilization of the Internet technologies for higher-level relationships presented a major challenge to the program marketers and administrators. In general, more advanced applications of e-RM-oriented features were found in websites maintained by large or public programs than by their counterparts. The main reasons for this phenomenon may be that small or private programs lack resource commitment and insufficient strategic planning prior to their website constructions.