Essay on Ctrip Casey analysis

Critically evaluate the resource-based view (RBV) of the firm as a means of explaining the sources and strength of the competitive advantage of Apple.

Before the days of the Internet, if a family wanted to travel to a far-off, exotic locale, they would have to either find a local travel agent or call a travel agency and plan their getaway. In the 1990’s, the Internet became a staple of everyday life and began entering many homes. As the availability of the Internet increased, so did the services available to clients. With the increasing availability of the World Wide Web the travel industry found itself faced with revolutionizing changes. All of the tools that were once solely available to travel agents now became readily available to anyone with access to the Internet and a search engine. Websites quickly formed around the idea of providing consumers with quick vacation planning ideas at low costs. Getting

Today’s on-line travel market is succeeding because the companies are using a more software-centric, online business model termed “E-commerce.” This has become the popular avenue for businesses as it mirrors the ideas of mobility. The sheer amount of data available, coupled with the advanced operating systems and social media platforms, have created new possibilities for E-commerce organizations. The infrastructure of E-commerce has expanded into platforms such as peer-to-peer networking, crowd-sourcing, social websites, and mobile devices and media. E-commerce trends are findings ways to incorporate every aspect of our daily lives into an online package associated with our everyday needs (Fishbein, 2013).

The resource-based view was developed to help emphasize internal capabilities as a means of creating competitive advantage (Henry, n.d.) In this view, the organization is comprised of a series of resources that are used by management. These resources are the source of new products and the internal improvements that help companies to better compete in the marketplace. There are two different types of resources tangible and intangible. The former category consists of physical assets, and is characterized as physical resources, human resources and capital resources. So physical resources are the buildings, machinery, materials and productive capacity. At Coca-Cola, the company's physical resources

Selecting a business strategy that details valuable resources and distinctive competencies, strategizing all resources and capabilities and ensuring they are all employed and exploited, and building and regenerating valuable resources and distinctive competencies is key. The analysis of resources, capabilities and core competencies describes the external environment which is subject to change quickly. Based off this information a firm has to be prepared and know its internal resources and capabilities and offer a more secure strategy. Furthermore, resources and capabilities are the primary source of profitability. Resources entail intangible, tangible, and human resources.

Barney, J. (2004). Firm resources and Sustained Competitive Advantage. Strategy: Process Content Context: an international perspective, de Wit & Meyer , 285-292.

He suggested that sustained competitive advantage derives from the resources and capabilities a firm controls that are valuable, rare, imperfectly imitable, and not substitutable. He further added that the resources and capabilities can be viewed in form of tangible and intangible assets. There are four different categories of resources financial, physical, human, and organization.

For a business to be successful and have a competitive advantage, it is important to evaluate the company’s resources and capabilities (Pitt & Koufopoulos, 2012). Resources in a company are the productive assets owned (tangible or intangible) whereas capabilities are what the company can do with this (Grant, 2010). “Establishing competitive

àAs a result, the number of user-oriented travel tools on airlines’ direct Web sites increased dramatically in just a few short years. Aggregator Web sites : —  Such as Expedia.com, Orbitz.com, and Priceline.com —  A pseudo-competitive position relative to the airlines' own direct Web sites but also offered services beyond flight purchase, including hotel and vacation packages. —  The airline paid a fee to the

Of the total travel market only 1% was generated from the online travel market, and consumers still depended on customer call centers to confirm payment status. To counteract the risks it is important that Lucky Air create an effective business-consumer-business model that will do the obvious and draw consumers to their site and make an online purchase of airfare. To draw in consumers Lucky Air will need to focus on Web 2.0, which is the unique feature or features of e-commerce and the Internet coming together as applications and social media technologies. Web 2.0 will allow for a better online experience with inter-human connections, consumer interacted blogs and the staff to constantly monitor the site to provide consumer feedback. Web 2.0 is crucial to providing customer relationship management. Promoting reviews from consumers in regards to destinations and airline experience are important so the consumer can feel they are important enough to expose the truth from other consumers even negative remarks. But the single most important part of focusing on e-commerce is the ability to provide a online experience and advanced technology that enables customer self-service without the need for multiple customer call centers. Customers should be able to pay for fares, cancel fares, use a safe payment method that can verify a credit card, check on the status of flights and use rewards programs

Managers who doubt this financial IT investment should ask themselves if they can afford loosing a customer on the grounds of not satisfying his needs. Since the rare resource of a company is its capabilities that create value with the technology, while actively implementing the CRM technology, on top of all the current capabilities and expertise already employed by Wyndham, it would be beneficial to add additional supporting business processes such as Newsletters, that can be published weekly or monthly, making sure not to bore the reader with regular issues of nonsense, but highlight the special program services and the company’s new moves in the field, Regular follow up calls to identify with the customers and find out how they are doing and regular market/satisfaction surveys that can be sent by e-mail, post online and most important, reviewed regularly by the company. An online guest feedback system can be implemented to help track customer service levels. Believing that taking care of the hotel’s employees will result in them taking care of the guests, a natural extension would be to implement an online employee opinion system as well, where employees can complete an online survey to measure their satisfaction and provide an immediate feedback. A key driver of guest satisfaction is how well employees handle issues that arise during a guest`s stay. It

This strategy emphasizes the use of an organization’s resources and capabilities to achieve a core competence that cannot be imitated by competitors. Furthermore, the resource based school argues that if an organization distinctively improves its internal capability; that is being able to have effective inside machinery to deliver products and services to customers, the organization will enjoy a massive advantage in the market. This school also argues that in order to have a competitive advantage, an organization must have resource and capabilities that are sophisticated to those of competitors (QuickMBA,

Hilton Hotels, one of the biggest worldwide corporations in the hospitality industry, adopted a Customer Really Matter (CRM) strategy to manage its diverse segments of hotels and to improve customer experience. The cornerstone of the CRM, the custom-built OnQ information system, built profiles of the guests, which could be used by the front desk employees and the reservations center to better serve the customers. The OnQ system did improved efficiency of call center operations, but the way of using it also reduced the flexibility of the customer service in the hotels. It could benefit or harm the service-profit chain depending on the specific situation. A few recommendations were made at the end of the case study to improve the system. In general, Hilton should implement big data analytics and give more control to the customers.

The resource-based view(RBV), based on the internal environment of a company, explains the performance differences among firms in an assumption of that having a high performance (Wernerfelt,1984) are made up of bundles of resources that give them advantages in the maketing(Barney and Arikan, 2001). It figures out the resources are valuable, rare, costly-imitated and have an organizational orientation, also known as VRIO framework(Barney, 2002). The resources, refer to the

For transforming a short-run competitive advantage into a sustained competitive advantage we require resources that are heterogeneous in nature and not perfectly mobile. This translates into valuable resources that are neither perfectly imitable nor substitutable without great effort. If these conditions are fulfilled then the bundle of resources can sustain the firm's above average returns.