Strategies for E-Commerce Applications in Tourism

Tourism industry has more and more realized the potential of Web-based tourism information systems (TIS) to increase the competitiveness by providing individual and specialized information about tourism objects. This lead to a broad spectrum of tourism information systems distributed over various Web sites. But the described situation is not really satisfying for users of such systems, the tourists, which require flexible and easy-to-use search functionalities and adequate user interfaces. To fulfill the tourists request for an extensive data collection on the one hand and to provide adequate search functionalities on the other hand, it is necessary to make accumulated data from different sources accessible. The integration of distributed data sources has great impact on the quality of tourism information systems and follows the trend not to implement further systems, but to extend and improve existing systems. Beside data integration, in this paper flexible electronic data interchange mechanisms, advanced search functionalities and powerful visualization possibilities are identified as the most important strategies to improve and enhance near future tourism information systems.