Introduction
Over the past decade, globalization offers, e-commerce and the advent of low-cost carriers have transformed the business of tourism. The traveler, curious and zapper, access in a real-time to a wealth of information and its behavior becomes unpredictable. Professionals try to innovate to satisfy this consumer with complex requirements, shared between individualism and communitarianism and between affective and budgetary accountability.
In 2003, the company Smartbox invented a new concept to meet the needs of this new market: a gift box. This innovation knows a huge success in France, and since 2006 the company, leader on the French market, has begun to deploy its services in other countries. So in a first part we will see what is this innovation, after I will explain the huge success of this innovation in the tourism market and present its weaknesses. Finally I will illustrate how it’s profitable for tourism sector taking the example of a French agglomeration which applied this innovation with the aim of increasing its tourism.
This innovation is mainly present in France, so this paper is only focused on the French tourism market and its consumers.
I. Smartbox or the birth of a new and modern way to sell a destination.
a) The evolution of the consumer’s needs in tourism
With the development of the e-commerce, the complete tourism industry structure is changing. In 2010, total online sales sites saw its turnover increasing by 22% in one year. If all product categories benefit from this growth, it is the e-Tourism which knew the fastest sales growth with 21%.On average in the third quarter of 2010, 11.7 million Internet users have accessed each month, at least at one of the Top 5 sites "Travel Agents" online, or nearly 30% of Internet users (29.6%).
The Web is used not only for collecting information, but also for ordering services. So, a new kind of user was born, one who acts like his (or her) own travel agent and creates a personalized travel.