Abstract
The tourism industry is an information-based sector and relies heavily on information and communication technologies to communicate across various players in the value chain.
However, there hasn’t been a systematic analysis and empirical research on the hotel industry in Malawi and the impact of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) exploitation on its competitiveness, enhancing competitive advantage, and upgrading of internal business processes. This paper presents partial results of a study into PHD on the Impact of ICT exploitation in the Tourism Value Chain and focuses on the exploitation of ICT in the Malawi hotel sector. The research involved a self-administered questionnaire survey of 96 hotels in Malawi. The findings from the empirical study suggest that the majority of hotels have some form ICT strategy, are using basic ICT hardware such as personal computer and laptop as an entry point into the virtual world, and using ICT for functional areas of business including human resources management, financial management and marketing their services and products. In addition, there are a number of challenges faced by hotels in Malawi including expensive ICT infrastructure, lack of expertise and technical knowhow in ICT, limited investments in ICT applications and software, and limited telecommunications infrastructure.