Opportunity or destiny: how do market knowledge resources and absorptive capacities lead to competitive advantage for travel agencies?

ABSTRACT

The study examines how market knowledge resources lead to competitive advantage for collaborative travel agencies (CTAs) via process innovation capabilities and value co-creation competence of CTAs. Data collection comes from key managers of travel agencies, and the partial least squares (PLS) were used for model analysis. The findings point out that market knowledge resources and absorptive capacities as two key factors that lead to the competitive advantage of CTAs; CTAs and their partners co-create value that remains relevant and in line with changing customer expectations; agile and flexible processes are essential for adapting to rapidly evolving tourism market conditions.

KEYWORDS:

• Market knowledge resources
• absorptive capacities
• inter-organizational systems
• travel agencies
• S-D logic
• technology-organization-environment
• tourism marketing

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(S).