Booking.com Issue for Small Businesses in Turkey

Özet

Purpose – Established in Amsterdam in 1996, Booking.com has become one of the world's largest travel e-commerce companies from a small Dutch venture. Booking.com offers its users access to many accommodation facilities around the world. In this respect, the small accommodation facilities in many parts of the world which registered to the booking.com system and have the opportunity to reach the consumer on the other side of the world.
Design/methodology/approach – Çeşme is a small province of İzmir, which is famous for its windsurf center, lodgings, and boutique hotels. These small hotels give services with few rooms in a warm atmosphere. Remarkably most of the owner/business exploiter of these small hotels does the most of the work of his/her hotels. Moreover, also they are the travel agency of themselves and had been using Booking.com.
Findings – However, it was restricted to use Booking.com in domestic reservations on 30 March 2017 in Turkey. Due to the restriction of Booking.com in Turkey, many small businesses have been adversely affected by this situation. This restriction has put these businesses into trouble in terms of marketing, especially since the service providers that are equivalent to the services provided by Booking.com are not fully efficient at that time.
Discussion – This study aims to reveal the effects of booking.com restriction in Turkey, Çeşme/Alaçatı via interview method. In this study, it was interviewed with 12 hotel owner/business exploiter in Çeşme/Alaçatı in 2017 and 2018 to reveal the problems of Booking.com’s domestic restriction. It has seen that Booking.com restriction has various adverse effects on small businesses in Çeşme/Alaçatı.