Towards a Typology of Retail Cybermediation in Tourism Markets

Rensmann Benjamin

Abstract
Cybermediaries are organisations that bring customers and suppliers of tourism and travelproducts together on the Internet. They bridge the structural gap between highly complextourism submarkets and customers facing various types of decision problems. Customers find alarge variety of different cybermediary websites assisting them in composing a holiday orbooking a flight ticket or a hotel room. The aim of this paper is the identification of differenttypes of business models of retail cybermediaries in tourism markets and their valuepropositions for customers. A conceptual framework is developed which describes the positionof cybermediaries in the cloud between complex supply-side market structures and a segmenteddemand-side. Furthermore, an analysis of 30 cybermediary websites has been conducted, theresults of which point to three types of cybermediary business models.

Keywords
intermediation; cybermediaries; value proposition; typology; tourism markets