In this system, users, travel service providers and platform provider are all key stakeholders and they can win the benefits together.
Speaking of users, their benefits are quite obvious. Theywill effortlessly get lots of highly relevant and peer-reviewed information including articles, journals, photos, videos, recommendations and so on from the system, which fully support their travel planning and decision-making process. Furthermore, the most important gaining for them is being a valuable member in the virtual travel community. Communities mostly provide a warm, trusting, and supportive atmosphere. When members share information in a community, they do it with great care and responsibility.
Thus members in this virtual travel community can get more useful and trustable suggestions from both real world and virtual friends, hence get their functional needs fulfilled. Through communicating on topics they are all interested in, sharing information they all care about, and even going companied on the same trip, they might develop a special friendship with one another, thus will accomplish their social needs. Furthermore, being active members they could get more reputations and even become popular within this community. They will gain a sense of achievement as being more notable and helpful in the community, thus fulfil their psychological needs. In addition, their contributionsalso bring back to them rewards from website as redeemable points.
On behalf of the platform provider, whois mainly responsible of the maintenance of data capturing, the well-working of the platform and information security of the users’ information, benefits for them are undoubtedly come from the reputation earned from users and the successful commission fee of booking and transaction as well as advertisement expense received from travel agents. The maintenance of the platform will also gain them another golden resource which is the invaluable data. By using data analysis tools, the platform provider can analysis users’ habits, favourites, and travel trends, etc. to facilitate travel service providers to improve their services and develop new products.
Finally, for travel service providers, they can directly make profits from business trades confirmed by the customers in the community and attract potential customers by analysing data provided bythe platform provider.