Development of Information System for Enhancing the Competitiveness of Home Stay

Abstract

Eco-tourism, especially Home Stay, is gaining popularity among modern tourists. Thai government policy is also geared towards the promotion of community development by income generation to the locals through Home Stay Tourism business. Nevertheless, promotion of home stay is still minimal since most home stay communities are still incapable of advertising; in fact, based on the present study in the upper northern region consisting of 36 home stays, only 19.4% had websites, 22% used Facebook for advertisement, 25% used emails, and 97.2% used phone services for making reservation or inquiries. Development of IT for reserving home stay accommodation seems therefore to be a tool to increase competitiveness of home stay business. The procedure of system development was applied in order to develop the IT that works as a database for seven groups of information, which are home stay accommodation information, accommodation information, community activities, awards, committee, and surrounding tourist destinations via Microsoft SQL Server for computer database management program and ASP Dot net for coding program language. There were 63 participants testing the new system on 12 home stays. Of this number, 39.7% are owners, 30.2% are committee members, and 19 % are youth in the homestay communities; majority is females or 60.3%, with ages between 15 to 76 years and age average of 43 years. The results of the evaluation of the satisfaction toward IT system of home stay shows that as a whole satisfaction was highest (x=4.51), especially on the point related to the high possibility of applying the system in actuality (x=4.69). This was followed by efficiency (x=4.46) and on benefits (x=4.38)