Electronic marketing in hotel enterprises: an empirical study at four and five stars hotels in İzmir

Marketing activities, which had been limited by geographical borders in the beginning, has reached out of geographical borders and disseminated globally parallel to the development of information and communication technologies. Tourism marketers now can communicate directly with numbers of consumers who could not be reached by using traditional marketing techniques by the help of internet technologies. In today?s competitive business environment hotel enterprises have to understand the ultimate importance of electronic marketing and its function in reaching to new markets. This study which was done by taking these changes in the business environment into consideration aims to analyze the approaches of lodging enterprises to marketing by the internet.In the first part of the study, the concepts of marketing, tourism marketing and electronic marketing and their features were examined. In the second part, after giving brief information on hotel enterprises, the benefits of electronic marketing to hotel enterprises were emphasized. In the third and the last part, the results of a survey on electronic marketing at hotel enterprises and its benefits were analyzed, hypotheses were tested. Based on the results of the empirical study and literature review, a general evaluation on the impacts of electronic marketing at hotel enterprises was done and some suggestions for tourism marketers were made.