Progress in information technology and tourism management: 20 years on and 10 years after the Internet—The state of eTourism research

This paper reviews the published articles on eTourism in the past 20 years. Using a wide variety of sources, mainly in the tourism literature, this paper comprehensively reviews and analyzes prior studies in the context of Internet applications to Tourism. The paper also projects future developments in eTourism and demonstrates critical changes that will influence the tourism industry structure. A major contribution of this paper is its overview of the research and development efforts that have been endeavoured in the field, and the challenges that tourism researchers are, and will be, facing

Enabling customers engagement and collaboration for small and medium-sized enterprises in ubiquitous multi-channel ecosystems

Over the last few years, we have encountered an exponential growth in online communication opportunities. Organizations have more and more ways to connect and engage with their current or future customers. The existence of more opportunities in connecting to people can be both an enabler and a burden. Being present at a multitude of different channels requires the effective management of a very large number of adapted contents, formats, and interaction patterns fulfilling the communication and cooperation needs of distributed target groups. In this respect, we integrate existing fragmented communication and monitoring approaches into a full-fledged communication model as a basis for an adequate engagement approach. We describe applications of our approach in both the eTourism and manufacturing domain. In this paper, we introduce an approach that will enable communication, collaboration and value exchange of users through a multitude of online interaction possibilities based on the use of semantic technology. Finally, we also compare our approach with existing solutions with respect to the identified challenges in this subject.European Union (UE) EU FP7 284860 (MSEE

Selling Rooms Online: The Use of Social Media and Online Travel Agents

Purpose – This paper aims to focus on the reason why hoteliers choose to be present in online travel agent (OTA) and social media web sites for sales purposes. It also investigates the technological and human factors related to these two practices. Design/methodology/approach – The research is based on a survey sent to a wide range of hotels in a Swiss touristic region. The empirical analysis involves the specification of two ordered logit models exploring the importance (in terms of online sales) of both social media and the online travel agent, Booking.com. Findings – Findings highlight the constant tension between visibility and online sales in the web arena, as well as a clear distinction in social media and OTA web site adoption between hospitality structures using online management tools and employing personnel with specific skills. Practical implications – The research highlights the need for the hospitality industry to maintain an effective presence on social media and OTAs in order to move towards the creation of a new form of social booking technologies to increase their visibility and sales. Originality/value – This research contributes to understanding the major role played by OTAs and social media in the hospitality industry while underlining the possibility of a major interplay between the two

Promoción en línea de los valores del desarrollo sostenible en los parques nacionales

Las tecnologías de la información y la comunicación (TIC) y tecnologías geoespaciales (TG) ofrecen soporte para gestionar áreas protegidas, como los parques nacionales, además de optimizar la experiencia de los visitantes. Este estudio identifica algunas herramientas cruciales empleadas para promover el desarrollo sostenible de las actividades turísticas en parques nacionales pioneros. Se realizó una revisión de la literatura y un análisis del sitio web de cinco parques (Yellowstone National Park, Royal National Park, Banff National Park, Tongariro National Park y Kruger National Park), reconocidos como destinos turísticos a nivel mundial. Los sitios web de esos parques fueron mapeados, a fin de hacer una comparación final con el sitio web del Parque Nacional de Itatiaia, en Brasil. Como resultados, los cinco parques presentan un contenido calificado, como mapas en alta resolución, mensajes de advertencia en tiempo real basados en TG y recorridos virtuales. A su vez, el sitio web del Parque Nacional de Itatiaia es sólo un portal de consulta, y necesita ser mejorado para subsidiar la experiencia turística

Application of Mobile Tourism for Kedah

Tourism sector is one of the most important economic sectors in hIalaysia and it attracts large numbers of tourists around the world. Tourists face problem of helping access in some remote area in Malaysia. However, Mobile coverage in Malaysia is very help and extensive. This study proposes a mobile application for tourism to serve tourist in Kedah. This study will contribute to support this sector, so this application will provide information, pictures and videos of tourist attractions in Malaysia in state of Kedah, that help the tourists to retrieve information in places that lacks Internet. In addition, this study has use the (Vaishnavi & Kuechler) methodology to develop application. Furthermore, this application will be built on the basis of advanced search to achieve the speed and ease of use, such as coding to filter and count the words

Web Usage Mining in Tourism — A Query Term Analysis and Clustering Approach

According to current research, one of the most promising applications for web usage mining (WUM) is in identifying homogenous user subgroups (Liu, 2008). This paper presents a prototypical workflow and tools for analyzing user sessions to extract business intelligence hidden in web log data. By considering a leading Swedish destination gateway, we demonstrate how query term analysis in combination with session clustering can be utilized to effectively explore the information needs of website users. The system thus overcomes many of the limitations of typical web site analysis tools that only offer general statistics and ignore the opportunities offered by unsupervised learning techniques