Trust as a Main Factor in Tourism Industry Relations

deepan — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 08:09:37 +0000

The third important aspect ofthe knowledge intensity in the tourism processes-implied by the two first aspects-is the increasing importance of trust in the relations between the acting elements (Bouncken, 2000). Trust as the expectation that the tnisted will be able and willing to fulfil the positive expectation of the trustee is a social relationship. The trusted may be an individual, then we speak of personal trust, or an institution, where we speak of institutional trust (Luhtnann, 1989). There is a third kind of trust, the ontological trust (Bohtne, 1998), which means the reliance on one’s own cognitive maps, built up by experience. The ability to give and take trust-to be trusted and to be a trustee-is an individual attribute and is acquired in the process of socialization (in the general meaning of Piaget, 1979: 88). The knowledge intensive services and relations in the tourism industry need trust, because the exchanged goods underlie asymmetric information. These trustful relations either personal or institutional-can only be established over tine. The high speed of the infonnation transfer processes is compensated by the low speed ofthe trust building processes. Only within existing trustful relations will the advantages of the high speed information processes produce the economic gains expected from them. Therefore the known and trusted partners will be the basis for the economic success in the tourism industry and trust as a part ofthe implicit knowledge (Polanyi, 1966) of persons and organizations will be a core competence in this industry. This is valid for the B2B relations in the touristn industry and applies too for travelers who don’l want to be surprised by unexpected qualities of the services. For the travelers very often instead of personal experience the source of trust is the reputation of agencies, operators or carriers or the persotial recotntnendation by trusted friends. The latter case could be called a “second order” trust, which is quite necessary in the touristn industry, because the travellers normally have no tegular and much repeated relations with the travel agencies or the other partners in the tourism system.

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Trust as a Main Factor in Tourism Industry Relations