随着新型辅助商的涌现,辅助商的角色已然从传统的企业服务型转向顾客辅助型。这一转变,使得辅助商在旅游分销渠道之最主要的信息流程和付款流程中起到了重要的中介作用,从而产生了显著的辅助效应和竞争效应。为验证这两类效应,以去哪儿网为例,利用近5年的百度指数数据对我国旅游在线预订市场中主要企业与辅助商之间关系进行统计分析。研究结果表明,去哪儿网作为顾客辅助型辅助商对原来行业中处于领导地位的携程网表现出明显的竞争效应,而对于处在跟随者地位的艺龙网则起到了显著的辅助效应。
With the success of new business models such as online travel vertical search,the role of new customer service facilita-tors in travel distribution channels began to draw attention of researchers.The customer assistance-oriented facilitators play an important intermediary role in providing information and facilitating purchasing process,which may result in opposite effects –“assisting effect”and“competitive effect”.This paper first develops analytical models and shows that a customer assistance-orien-ted facilitator has different effects for enterprises with different market positions.Then,using data of China OTA market,we provide empirical evidence in support of this result.This paper takes databases of Qunar as an case.Utilizing the data of three ma-jor websites from Baidu Index from June 16,2008 to June 30,2013,a total of 263 weeks,this paper validates the actual impact of the customer assistance-oriented facilitators with statistical analysis,correlation analysis,and t-test.The results show that Qu-nar exhibits a significant competitive effect on the market leader Ctrip,and produces a remarkable assisting effect on the market follower eLong.