Conclusion

The Internet does enable tourist companies to increase their competitiveness. IT can improve the efficiency of suppliers and provide tools for the development and delivery of different tourist products. One of the benefits reached is the reducing the dependence from the intermediates on the distribution of tourist products. Hotel owners should invest more money in technology besides concentrating more time and attention to subjects on that area. IT affects all aspects of hotel value chain; going far beyond sectors and departments. As technology will be intrinsically linked to hotel business, its executives will insert technology in all their strategic decisions for the facility. That implies all the employees (including managers and directors) to have enough knowledge to extract the potential technology provides.

Using the Internet in the hotel industry in Natal has good prospects of growth, though in many hotels the use of such technology is still crawling. On the other hand, there are some hotels using and steadily setting the trend. It will be an important and strategic issue for businessmen to stimulate such Internet use policies inside the tourist trade, so they become "wired" to this new reality that can work in even terms with their competitors.

In this research, it was possible to portray the situation of mid and big-sized hotels in Natal, RN, Brazil, and contribute by offering a panoramic view on the use of the Internet and some impacts perceived by managers in the hotel industry. It has been demonstrated that there are few differences of opinion as to the use of the Internet in hotels. That leads to an important conclusion: nowadays, the Internet has become a highly relevant instrument, notwithstanding any demographic variables that may occur (e.g., age, experience, size and rate).

However, for its transversal and temporal character as well as its restraint to Brazilian hotels with more than 40 rooms in a specific city, it is not possible to generalize all hotel universes. Hence, there is an expectancy that other researches on academic level may complete and broaden this basis of knowledge on the impacts of IT applications, remarkably the ones developed for the Web platform and therefore, help the production sector to better understand them and adopt them effectively in their businesses.

For that purpose to be fulfilled, other research should be developed by incorporating other variables, using other analysis techniques and observing different cities, bigger hotel samples or even comparative studies with the results obtained.