E-commerce adoption of travel and tourism organisations in South Africa, Kenya, Zimbabwe and Uganda

Africa, with its great wealth in wildlife and unique resorts, can benefit from the ever increasing user population of the Internet, particularly in the USA and Western Europe where most of the tourists to Africa come from (Internet World Stats, 2004. World Internet Users and Population Stats. .). A first survey was carried out to find the nature and extent of e-commerce adoption by tourism organisations from South Africa, Kenya, Zimbabwe and Uganda which are all popular tourist destinations in eastern and southern Africa. For comparison, a second survey of tourism organisations from USA and Western Europe was also carried out. A total of 373 websites from the four African countries and 180 from the USA and Western Europe were accessed and then evaluated against a list of e-commerce features. The surveys revealed that few of the African organisations are embracing e-commerce and that, although some websites were comparable to those of their western counterparts, the majority had room for considerable improvements. The African websites were found to be generally informative but lacked interactive facilities for online transactions. It is recommended that these African organisations evolve their websites into marketing tools to capitalise on the potential Internet market.