The assessment of hospitality and tourism SMEs awareness on the use of mobile technology and Internet services - a case study of hotel businesses in Thailand

The purpose of this paper is to examine the awareness of SMEs hotel customers on the use of innovative channels via mobile technology and Internet services. The implications of this paper are useful in the two folds. Firstly, those are the SMEs hotels who are seeking for the innovative channels to serve their customer's needs and to be used as their competitive advantages to compete with their competitors. Secondly, those are the digital service providers regarding mobile technology and Internet services including hardware, software, peopleware, network infrastructure including e-marketing service providers who serve specifically this business segment. The proposed model comprises the activities of hotel customers using multiple channels via mobile technology and Internet services. The result showed that hotel customers of SMEs in hotel business in small/medium scale, have high level of awareness on using mobile technology/Internet services at significant level of 95 percent confidence level, which include social media channels in serving the activities of searching surrounding attractions of the hotel businesses in Thailand.