USE OF ONLINE BOOKING SYSTEMS IN ISTRIAN AGRITOURISM

This paper focuses on the application of ICT in tourism, i.e. it examines the use of online booking systems in terms of offer of accommodation capacities in agritourism and rural family hotels in Istria. This research seeks to determine how the owners of rural family hotels and agritourism sell their accommodation capacities and manage their bookings, what online booking systems they use and whether they find them satisfactory. In the theoretical part of this paper, the advantages of ICT in the business processes in tourism are presented with the emphasis on the computerization of booking offices of hotel accommodation capacities and the emergence of online booking systems. The advantages of online booking systems for business entities and end users are analyzed. Relevant research shows growth in the online booking market around the world, which is consequently also reflected on tourism in Croatia. However, the most popular online booking systems like Booking.com, TripAdvisor, Expedia, Hotels.com, Agoda and others offer mostly hotel accommodation followed by private apartment accommodation, and usually there is no search category for agritourism and rural tourism facilities. Unlike other booking systems, Airbnb.com, offers exclusively private accommodation. It is the most widely used booking system by the agritourism and rural family hotel owners in Istria for the distribution of their tourist offer and the selling of their accommodation capacities, followed by Booking.com and TripAdvisor. This research has shown that the agritourism and rural family hotel facilities in Istria are widely available online via owners' web pages, with 84 % of these facilities available for online bookings. The participants have expressed high satisfaction with the online booking system they use, although many of them keep records of the bookings in the written form as well.