Trust as a marketing tool in B2B on line relations. A focus on OTAS

Information and Communication Technologies have deeply transformed business strategies and practices in the tourism and hospitality industries (Ip et al., 2011). Among them, the Internet in particular has served as a competitive marketing and communication tool for hoteliers in facilitating information sharing and online transactions (Tse, 2013), thus leading businesses into a new era. Authors have to re-examine the transactional tools employed in the hotel-OTA relationship, with a particular regard to the issue of trust, which is widely recognized by managerial literature as a key factor for fostering customer-vendor relations and sustaining market share (Urban et al., 2009) in socially distant relationships, such as online hotel booking. A topic point of research concerns the development of trust between vendors and buyers in the distribution channel relationships: from the buyer’s perspective, the vendor’s reputation and its investment in the relationship are trust boosters.