E-commerce and Travel

In the past month or so, I have realized two things about the relationship between e-commerce and international cultures. First, e-commerce can bring bits of a culture or country to you without you ever having to leave home. Second, it enables us to begin thinking about visiting other countries and can help us make plans to visit these civilizations.

Several weeks ago, my nineteen-year-old brother, Brett, was bored with his schoolwork and decided to take a break. Half-way through an episode of Man vs. Wild on the Discovery Channel, he logged onto eBay.com to search for an item he has wanted for years and was reminded of while watching Bear Grylls navigate through Kimberly, Australia. Minutes later, he became a proud owner of a hand painted Aboriginal style didgeridoo, a wind instrument of the Indigenous Australians of northern Australia. When I asked him why he wanted a didgeridoo, he said, “Because it’s cool looking. I could get one, it wasn’t expensive, and not everyone has one.”

http://search.ebay.com/search/search.dll?from=R40&_trksid=m37&satitle=didgeridoo&category0= E-bay is amazing. For the small price of 25 dollars, Brett was able to bring a piece of the Indigenous Australian culture into his dorm room. “I may never go to Australia,” Brett told me. “But at least I have something that makes me feel like I have been there.”

While I haven’t succumbed to the lure of e-bay, like Brett has, I have recently fallen to the ploys of expedia.com. That’s right, I booked a trip using this website. My friend, Samantha, and I decided that we want to go to Istanbul next March. For weeks we searched throughout cyber space for Istanbul vacation packages. While it crossed my mind to visit AAA and work with a travel agent, the Web is just so much more convenient. Not to mention the ease of booking a vacation online – it’s just like buying a t-shirt from gap.com! Therefore, we stuck with the Internet and found airfare and hotel on expedia.com that fit our budgetary obligations and location requirements.

Eyefortravel.com is a global online publisher focusing on distribution, marketing and technology developments in the travel and tourism industries (http://www.eyefortravel.com/). It is an information portal for the travel industry and it includes international travel news stories that are updated daily. Eyefortravel.com compiles annual travel reports for the U.S., Asia Pacific region, and Europe, among others, that helps the reader understand more about regional travel markets, with an emphasis on e-commerce. These reports are really expensive (the U.S. one is $995) so I haven’t read any of them, but I’d be interested to see where Americans are traveling and how many of them are booking vacations online as opposed to going through a travel agent (much like myself and my friend). There are also countless blogs that provide daily airline news (http://www.onlinetravelreview.com/), highs and lows of the online travel business (http://tims-boot.blogspot.com/) and discussions about online travel marketing (http://blog.relactions.com/).

E-commerce is not just about buying DVDs and clothes anymore. We can bring cultural artifacts into our homes and book customized trips to visit different civilizations. E-commerce is quick and easy, and it can help open our eyes to other cultures.