IST and Tourism cross
fertilisation
Information Society Technologies for
Tourism
Brussels, 9th July 2001
Summary
• Tourism and employment initiative: managing
the impact of ICT based services
• Re-grouping Tourism Business Stakeholders
• The digital fracture
• The needs and the challanges
• Co-operation and knowledge sharing
Tourism and employment initiative:
managing the impact of ICT based
services
• Tourism become one of the best performing
sectors in the digital economy
• Globalisation brought a complete new
competitive environment: new demand
requirements; new players in the distribution
sector; new roles for the traditional actors
• It is fundamental to the tourism sector to
understand and measure the adoption and the
impact of those new services
ICT based services – the concept
• Information & Communication Technology
based Services refer to the use of digital
electronic methods and tools to gather,
process, share and distribute information
throughout the tourism value chain. Digital
electronic methods and tools can be software
applications and components, data, formal
specifications, standards or devices supporting
a specific set of tourism related business
processes.
Re-grouping Tourism Business
Stakeholders
• The new power of customers
• Accommodation services: direct access to costumer;
improving business efficiency
• The traditional distribution: price and differentiation
strategies; the meddle sector
• Transport: extending the reach; from the auction to the
full digital service
• New players: new entrants with strong alliances with
tourism players; new role for the old players
• Destination Management Organizations: image control;
information management; Business integration.
Re-grouping Tourism Business
Stakeholders
• The impact of the digital revolution on each
tourism sector stakeholder depends on a few
basic factors:
– Core competence,
– Size
– Relative position in the tourism value chain.
• Direct communication between customers and
suppliers, transparency of the market and low
barriers to entry are producing dramatic
changes in the value chain.
The digital fracture
• The level of understanding of ICT potential
remains limited, specially for SMEs
• Lack of skills and resources remain the most
important barrier
• In most cases, connection is not combined
with real changes in the business structure,
neither in internal processes nor in relations
with external actors (customers or other
businesses).
The needs and the challenges
• The organizational perspective:
– 24 h a day / 7 days a week
– Multi channel flexible operation
• The structural perspective
– New partnership and co-operation models
• Systemic dimension:
– New ownership and dissemination models
for information
– The commercial value of non-commercial
information
The needs and the challenges
• Commercial domain:
– Flexible and customized product
– New marketing segmentation criteria
– Permanent on-line real time availability
– One-to-one relation
• Law and taxes
– Liability rules for complex multilateral relations
– IPR
– Local laws and taxes for global market competition
Co-operation and knowledge
sharing
• Meaning of co-operation evolved considerably:
– Political and social scope: policy concertation at
regional, national, European and Global level;
– Operational and business level: business process
integration across the value chain, between
suppliers, intermediaries, customer and enabling
services providers
– Knowledge sharing: putting together knowledge
resources, provide global access, improve skills and
innovating business models
Technology is in place
• Tourism sector needs the ICT based services
to develop co-operation: platforms,
applications, standards, devices
• Leading technologies are in place: mobility
and pervasive computing; interoperability and
seamless systems integration; Intelligent
agents.
• The challenge is to be able to go beyond the
web and to use this new co-operation
networks to build the new business processes.
Tourism and employment
working group proposals
• Knowledge Network for e-tourism
• Special Interest Working Groups for specific
urgent questions:
– Mobile e-commerce services for tourism
– Legislation and Tax regulations
• Support centre to enhance market integration
for SME through Destination Management
System.
Luis Costa
Icep Portugal
[email protected]
www.icep.pt
www.portugalinsite.com