An establishment of an online tourism portal for untapped places

Abstract

This study explores the emergence of PEEPS, an independent tourism product, and brand with the primary purpose of promoting ‘UNEXPLORED PLACES.’ ‘PEEPS’ is a new social application platform in the tourism industry. Like most social applications, PEEPS also mainly focuses on photos and videos as their medium of marketing. Although PEEPS has started to make its name in the travel and tourism community, it still requires further development in a few areas such as its functionality, usability, and overall benefit of the application to be optimally experienced by the users. PEEPS, founded by Code of Origin Sdn Bhd (“CODE”) started the platform by allowing people to rent virtual space on their website or online portal to promote under-commercialised and unexplored places and venues. The idea of PEEPS came about through the observation of a disruptive innovation theory, which describes how products that lack traditionally favoured attributes but offer alternative benefits can, over time, transform a market and capture mainstream consumers. Hence, the purpose of this study is to deep dive into the further development of the application for all the important areas in making PEEPS “AN ESTABLISHMENT OF AN ONLINE TOURISM PORTAL PLATFORM FOR UNTAPPED PLACES”. There are two groups in the PEEPS’ target market, i.e. consumers and entrepreneurs. This portal is similar to the Airbnb application, however, it is broader in scope as it gives anyone the right to promote a place or venue, which does not matter whether they own the place or not (these people are the entrepreneurs and are referred to as the “host” and “intermediaries/middleman”). PEEPS enables and encourages people to suggest and promote under-commercialised or less known places as tourist attractions, contributing to the economic, social, and cultural benefits. PEEPS is very appropriate during times like these as the world is currently experiencing a pandemic that adversely affects the tourism industry. PEEPS can provide domestic tourism opportunities for these “Unexplored Places.” This study examined how to enhance, develop, and implement the PEEPS Online Portal system with usability that is in line with users’ input. Therefore, the adoption of an integrated PEEPS portal online system would enhance the services through improved systems functionality, usability, and enhanced benefits of experiences.