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INTRODUCTION
With the rapid development of information and communication technology, Internet and World Wide Web (WWW) have become important tools in business, which has a major impact on business world. Internet has significantly revolutionized travel industry in the last decade. In the early stage of Internet market, online travel service companies had competed with traditional travel service companies by providing travel service at lower prices. With an increasing number of travel companies participating in the Internet market, the initial price advantages in online travel service has nullified, and low price has become a minimum qualification to compete in the Internet market (Sohn and Tadisina 2008). Therefore, travel companies operating in the Internet market need to find something else to attract customers to their online travel service. Oliveria et al. (2002) state that electronic service (eservice) might be the key to long termadvantages in the digital times, and eservice quality is becoming even more critical for companies to retain and attract customers in the digital age (Oliveria et al. 2002).Though eservice is very important in the Internet market, most online travel companies seem not to focus on their online service to customers. They do not recognize that the competition among online travel companies relies mainly on their online service, and they do not have the motivation to adopt some strategies to develop or improve their online travel service to customers. Even though some companies have realized the importance of online travel service to customers, they seem not to understand customers perception of online travel service and how customers assess their online travel service quality. Currently, despite many studies concerning traditional service quality, relatively few studies have been conducted in the Internet market, and even less on online travel service quality. This study focuses on eservice quality dimensions in the Internet market with an empirical study on online travel service. The purpose of this study is to develop a scale to evaluate eservice quality, which provides fresh insight into the dimensions of eservice quality. Internetbased travel companies mainly provide intangible service to customers. Thus, in this study the meaning of eservice indicates any intangible productrelated services over the Internet provided by Internetbased travel companies. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Following the introduction, the second section provides a relative literature review on both service quality and eservice quality construct. The third section presents the research hypotheses and research model. The fourth section is on empirical data analysis, and the fifth section discusses the results and the findings of this study. Finally, the study concludes with a discussion of the limitation of the study, and the future research in this field is presented as well.

Overview
India is the most dynamic and fast growing online travel market . Online travel contributes 70% of all e-commerce activities globally. Private equity players have made huge investments in the online travel agency (OTA) segment in the past two years

Online travel market is the most crowded arena in the E-commerce segment with many new players entering this space Makemytrip, Yatra, Cleartrip and Travelguru are the leading players in the OTA segment IXIGO, Ezeego1 and Zoomtra are the leading meta search engines in online travel With the existing competition online travel space is sure to see consolidation in the coming years One can expect numerous acquisitions and buyouts to happen as cash rich international players are entering the market Added to that airline companies like SpiceJet, IndiGo and KingFisher in India are coming up with their own portal Rang7, which will affect OTAs

Overview of the Current Players in the Travel Industry

The current players in the On-Line travel industry, as shown in Figure 1, are as follows: There are hundreds of thousands of hotels, thousands of airline companies, tens of thousands of rent-a-car agencies, hundreds of hotel chains, and hundreds of rent-a-car chains. However there are only two switching companies, namely Pegasus and Worldres and only four major GDS (Global Distribution System) companies. As already mentioned, the GDSs are mostly legacy systems with their own private EDI based networks, difficult to use cryptic languages, and limited speed and search capabilities. With a communication medium as ubiquitous as Internet, and with the infrastructure SATINE is proposing, a new Web service based business model becomes possible and feasible for the travel industry. The advantages to be gained from this business model are as follows: With the semantically enriched Web service based architecture of SATINE, interoperability among very many heterogeneous systems such as flight reservation and hotel booking systems of individual companies will be facilitated. Furthermore, it will become possible to integrate the back end systems of the travel companies with their front end systems. Among the millions of travel agents, only about %10 to 20% of all travel agents are in connection with the GDS companies. Most travel agencies and travel organization companies choose to manage travel services by themselves, due to reasons which may be technical, e.g., private networks, specialized hardware and cryptic interfaces required by GDSs or economical, e.g. due to high commission rates and yearly subscription fees issued by the GDS company. SATINE architecture will enable such companies both to obtain the travel products they need from the Internet as well as to offer their products over the Internet. Also travel agencies generally choose to communicate with travel service providers directly bypassing GDSs, for better pricing than GDS listings and to obtain specialized services. Nevertheless, extra effort is required for traditional communication and necessity for establishing partnerships. Whereas SATINE architecture provides a solution for all companies, generally small-to-medium level

enterprises in the travel industry, for easily publishing and selling their tourism services as well as providing large selection options from a rich service pool. GDS companies do not support every type of travel product in the industry, but only the major ones; airline ticketing, hotel reservation and car rental. However, there are other types of specialized services, especially different types of tour and transportation based travel products. These services generally do not have a common, uniform structure as found in airline, hotel and car-rental services hence it is difficult to develop a common interface for such kinds of services to be provided by GDSs. On the other hand, Web service based SATINE architecture is an ideal fit for publishing such services by also facilitating their discovery through the Web service registries and P2P networks.

Figu re 3. Overview of the Current Players in the Travel Industry

GDSs provide hotel booking only for major hotel chains. There are millions of hotels that can not sell their rooms through GDSs that will benefit from the SATINE architecture. A variety of business opportunities for the companies in the travel industry will be enabled by using the SATINE architecture. The travel agencies and service providers will collaborate with each other on a new level. The companies will no longer need to make pre-agreements with respective suppliers; the service alternatives will be found on the fly through Web service discovery. It will be a possibility to construct package services which are comprised of services provided locally by the initiator company and services discovered within the network. Negotiations on the service that will be purchased as well as customization of service properties on the fly are other possible types of enhancements in the ebusiness for the travel domain.