Potentiality of Vietnam Online Tourism - The Case of Skydoor

Abstract: ICT Entrepreneurship is a master program aims at bringing graduates with ICT backgrounds (Information Technology, Computer Science, Telecommunication …) business knowledge which is specialized into ICT field. A thesis project is compulsory for judging the student’s ability of applying theoretical understanding into solving realistic matters, especially within startup environments. That suggests the selection of topic for the project: Potentiality of online tourism market in Vietnam – the case of Skydoor. Vietnam has been widely recognized as an attractive destination for travel, and the Vietnamese government has been seriously determining to lift the industry according to its potential and expectation. However, ICT application within tourism is still very limited. Within that context, Skydoor appeared as an innovative venture which runs an online platform on tourism (www.skydoor.net). This platform is a combination of a web 2.0 application and an information portal. For that reason, it connects people with shared interest in tourism and provides them with exciting web facilities and useful information from multiple sources. As many other startups, Skydoor is having many opportunities as well as against many big challenges at the moment. With a complete product and initial steps to bring it to users, what else can the company do to attain a sustainable growth in future? It requires deep study about the industry as well as the company status to plan for short and long terms. This project helps to explore the industry of online portals focused on tourism in Vietnam and examine the position of Skydoor within that situation. Methodology includes literature review, information searching, data gathering and information/data analysis. The list of resources used for the literature review is in Bibliography section at the end of this report. Primary information/data as input for the analysis process are from surveys and direct interviews with Skydoor founders, while secondary information/data are collected from various resources on the Internet, from official Skydoor blog, and from personal blogs of Skydoor founders. Links to original sources are listed in the References section, whereas the surveys’ artifacts are included in the Appendix A. The fundamental framework used for analysis is DDART, with supports from the tools introduces during the courses of Business Opportunity/Global Entrepreneurial Leadership.