The spillover effects of online tourism platforms on sustainable development

In recent years, the proliferation of self-established and third-party online tourism platforms has impacted the visitor economy and social welfare sustainably. Tourism enterprises face the key decision of whether to join third-party platforms or sell tourism services/products directly to consumers. Some researchers have addressed issues about online tourism platforms, but none analyse the internal mechanism and operational management, or the impact of the online tourism platform on sustainable economic growth and social welfare. To fill this gap, we establish an analytical model to explore the optimal tourism marketing and operational management of online tourism platforms for non-profit tourist attractions and for-profit tourism enterprises, which can help guide the decisions of managers. We construct a game-theoretical model in which competing tourism attractions can choose only solo or dual online tourism platform promotion. When competition on a third-party platform is intense, for-profit tourism enterprises benefit from dual platforms. We further illustrate that with high competition, non-profit tourist attractions provide higher social welfare when offering tourism products/services on both self-established and third-party tourism channels. However, with lower competition, third-party tourism platforms harm social welfare if the tourism service/product quality is extremely high or low. Under a decentralised structure, we find that related tourism enterprises prefer to follow and collaborate with their tourist attractions' channel selection when competition in the third-party platform is not fierce. This result indicates that a third-party tourism platform improves the visitor economy and social welfare if the tourist attraction collaborates with its tourism-related enterprises through the online tourism platform.