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Technologies also brought several challenges in the context of transportation (mobility) in tourism. The mobility services using Internet comprise both those which have used the Internet since its advent, as well as start-ups which have recently emerged as a result of the growth on the online market and are originating major shifts in e-tourism (Stone, 2017). While airlines, bus and railway transportation and car rentals are mostly composed of established or incumbent firms in the online transportation market, ride hailing (e.g. car sharing (e.g. Drive Now), or bike/scooter sharing (e.g. Lime) are newly arrived players that are changing the way people in general, and visitors in particular, perceive and consume transportation services (Stone, 2017).

In 2018, the online mobility services registered a global revenue of US$ 411.2 billion and are estimated to have an annual average growth of 7.6% until 2023 (Statista, 2019). According to Phocuswright (2019a), 70% of those revenues were generated by the booking

of flights, and the overall online sales of flights are expected to have an average annual growth of 5.6% until 2023. Although OTAs still dominate the bookings of flights’ tickets, with the exception of the low-cost segment, airlines have been using ICT solutions to gain control of their inventory and sell flights to their passengers without the need of intermediaries, which demand commissions in exchange. As a result of such efforts, in 2016, around 38% of the total issued flight tickets were sold via the websites of airlines (SITA, 2019). In the overall online transportation services, the Chinese market is the fastest growing, with an estimated annual growth of 11.3% through 2023 (Statista, 2019). However, in 2018, the countries holding the highest penetration rate on online transportation services were Finland and Sweden, followed by the United Kingdom and Norway (Statista, 2019).

Within the overall tourism sector, the airline industry is arguably the most digitalised service of all. In the last decades, several factors contributed to an increasing use of technologies among airline companies, such as: optimisation of aircrafts (e.g. the advent of the jet propulsion, which improved airplanes’ speed, safety, passenger capacity and cost- effectiveness) as well as the advent of mass tourism (Sezgin & Yolal, 2012); Computerised Reservation Systems (CRS) (e.g. SABRE) (Gunther, Ratliff, & Sylla, 2012) and Global Distribution Systems (GDSs) – namely Amadeus (1987), Worldspan (1988), and Galileo (1993) – (Egger & Buhalis, 2011); air transport deregulation (Doganis, 2013; Pickrell, 2017); and the emergence of the low-cost airlines, which sell almost every seat in their inventory directly through the Internet (Castillo-Manzano, Castro-Nuño, López-Valpuesta, 2017; e- Business Watch, 2006).

It is becoming ever clearer that ICTs and the Internet in particular will become more and more crucial to the operational and strategic dimensions of airlines. In 2003 Buhalis had already argued that the Internet would heavily support successful airlines not only regarding the marketing mix of airlines, as it would also determine their strategic thinking and become more critical to their operations and strategy (Buhalis, 2003). It can therefore be foreseen that ICTs will not only establish all elements of the marketing mix of airlines in the future, but they will also determine their strategic directions, partnerships and even ownership (Egger & Buhalis, 2008). In 2018, airlines spent around US$ 49 billion in IT, having invested heavily in cloud computing, cybersecurity, and business intelligence (SITA, 2019). When it comes to services to passengers, in 2018 mobile check-in and boarding services were provided by 8 out of 10 airlines worldwide (SITA, 2019). In addition, by the end of 2019, more than 83% of airlines have implemented mobile app services enabling passengers to search flights (SITA, 2019). Moreover, a quarter of airlines provided location-based

notifications to their customers, while 33% of them had implemented baggage location status updates to passengers (SITA, 2019). A further evidence of the intensive and highly sophisticated use of ICTs by current airlines is the fact that, by the end of 2019, 44% of the world’s airlines had implemented a major Artificial Intelligence (AI) programme, while other 45% were starting to develop such programmes (SITA, 2019). The use of AI by airlines is mostly aimed at developing virtual sales agents and chatbots to interact with passengers through their websites and apps, providing targeted and personalised advertising (SITA, 2019).

Ride hailing (e.g. Uber) is the second largest as well as fastest growing online mobility service in both the US and China, with an overall global revenue of US$ 61.5 billion in 2018 (Statista, 2019). The fact that the revenues of this relatively recent type of online mobility service are roughly three times larger than those of the car rental sector seems noteworthy, if not surprising. In Europe, although ride hailing is on the rise, legal regulations and a higher propension to private car ownership explain a relatively smaller expression of this type of service (Statista, 2019).

Concerning the bus and railway subsector, until recently only a minority of travellers tend to purchase train tickets though the Internet, with the exception of long-distance travels and fast trains such as TGV. However, this tendency is gradually changing as there has been a recent increase in the number of online platforms developed by the railway industry. According to Egger and Buhalis (2011), Bahn.de, the German Railways website, was a good example of this shifting trend, as it is not only one of the most visited travel portals in Europe but also allows dynamic travel planning and e-ticketing of train and bus transportation, also through mobile devices.

In 2018, the revenues of the bus and train online services amounted to US$39.5 billion. Nowadays, railways communication systems are applied in three main domains, namely (i) safety and control, (ii) train operations and (iii) customer-oriented networks (Fraga-Lamas, Fernández-Caramés, & Castedo, 2017). The International Transport Fund (2011) estimated that railway transportation passengers will increase 200%-300% by 2050 which, alongside the growing complexity of high-speed railways networks demand for an extensive use of ICTs (Ai et al., 2015). This phenomenon has led researchers in this field to coin the expression The Internet of Trains, inspired by The Internet of Things (Borgi, Zoghlami, & Abed, 2017). The most innovative ICT solutions within the railway transportation sector encompass (Fraga-Lamas et al., 2017): (i) passenger and freight information systems; (ii)

smart infrastructure; (iii) safety assurance; (iv) video surveillance systems; and (v) signalling systems. However, the Internet of Trains still faces many challenges, such as standardisation, interoperability, scalability and cybersecurity (Fraga-Lamas et al., 2017).

Regarding its turnover, until the late 2000s, the car hire subsector was the second most important within the transportation sector (Statista, 2019). Large companies, such as Avis

and Hertz, have long implemented ICT-based systems contemplating the web, aiming to manage their extensive and disperse inventory and support their relationship with customers, namely through direct online marketing (Epsilon Conversant, 2019). More recently, car hire companies have also been using the Internet to optimise their synergies with airlines, empowering customers to use their airline loyalty programmes’ bonus points to rent a car from a partner company (Egger & Buhalis, 2011). Today, evidence shows that car rental companies are rapidly losing customers to ride hailing and sharing services. Indeed, a survey conducted by Epsilon Conversant (2019) between 2016 and 2018 concluded that 63% of previous car rental customers reduced their spending on car rentals, which is almost a $3.2 billion loss. Moreover, 56% of customers stopped using car rental services altogether, with most of them moving to rideshare services (Epsilon Conversant, 2019). The relatively lower levels of mobile-technology friendliness of the car rental sector, its less efficient booking systems as well as its higher prices, have contributed to their loss of competitiveness to ride hailing and sharing services (Epsilon Conversant, 2019).