Tourism Management 22 (2001) 103}112

Book reviews

Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism1999D. Buhalis and W. Schertler (Eds.); Proceedings of thesixth International Conference (ENTER) in Innsbruck,Austria; Springer, Wien, New York, 1999, xii # 407 pp,ISBN 3-211-83258-0

Recent advances in telecommunications, networking,databases, data mining and electronic markets provideopportunities that will radically alter the business modelstourism organisations use to compete. This strategic useof information and communication technology addsvalue to key organisational activities which often resultsin positive changes to internal procedures, services, prod-ucts, external and internal relationships as well as theoverall goals of the organisation, resulting in a com-petitive advantage. On the other hand, the relativelylow cost of the technology can mean that the advantagegained through an innovative use may only be temporaryor easily copied by others. Therefore continual innova-tion and awareness of new developments is needed tomaintain an organisation's image in the public eye andits position in the industry. These issues are addressedin the subtopics used to organise these conferenceproceedings.

The main theme for the conference was the strategicuse of information and communication technologies(ICT) in tourism from the perspectives of both academicsand practitioners. The papers are grouped under eightsections as follows: (1) knowledge management intourism, (2) changing consumer behaviour through IT,(3) using IT to support consumer choice and skills, (4)Engineering tourism applications, (5) the empowermentof small/medium enterprises through IT, (6) using IT forhospitality management, (7) using IT to redesign traveldistribution and (8) destination marketing systems andIT developments.

The section on knowledge management in tourismdoes not deal solely with strategic opportunities for usingthe Internet as stated in the preface, but rather witha variety of strategic applications of information techno-logy. The "rst paper is an application of descriptive andmultivariate statistical techniques to determine the rela-tionships between a number of variables found in theregistration data for the Tux resort in Tyrol, Austria. It isnot a true data mining application since the amount ofdata is small, it comes from a single source and no truly`unknowna patterns emerged from the study. The second

paper speculates as to how the value chain paradigmmight be used to evaluate the use of IT in the recreationand tourism sector to achieve process innovations andeconomies of scale. The remaining papers explore thestructural changes that the Internet can bring to thetravel industry as well as its ability to aid the industryin pro"ling customers to facilitate mass customisationof tourism packages and services. Presently, theInternet is used by travel agents and suppliers as a meansto cut coordination, communication and transactioncosts. In addition, consumers can use it to search forinformation and in obtaining a price advantage, makingintermediaries somewhat obsolete. Then again, increasedmarket transparency and the ability to build customerpro"les via the Internet can be used to advantage bysuppliers and mediators to better manage unused capa-city, enhance relationship marketing, customise travelproducts and realise cost savings on standard serviceswithout the expense of traditional direct marketingcampaigns.

In the next section, Pijl and Bartelink propose the useof the web as a source of pre-sales information which canbe requested by a mobile sales representative, sent toa ful"lment centre, printed and mailed to the customer.The paper seems inappropriately classi"ed here underchanging consumer behaviour since the primary bene"tis mass customisation potential, reduced distributioncosts, faster delivery and ease of updating. The remainingpapers in this section and in the following section onusing IT to support consumer choice deal with issuessuch as psychological and economic barriers to wide-spread use of IT, customer pro"ling, disintermediationand skill requirements for new graduates. Bjork's "eldstudies conclude that perceived security risk, uncertaintyabout the system and ability to use it correctly as well asa desire for personal service are still major psychologicalbarriers to widespread use of the Internet for buyingservices. Dellaert's study surveys regular Internet users,a sample that has fewer psychological barriers than thegroup studied by Bjork. Intermediaries were seen asuseful only if they could provide in-depth information onservices. Curry and Alpert discuss expectations of poten-tial imbalance between inbound and outbound tourismbased on a future study which will examine the e!ect ofthe Internet on size and depth of the consumer's set ofdestination choices. Beirne and Curry's lab experimentused students who were familiar with using the web todetermine consumer attitudes on the e!ectiveness of

using the web to obtain travel related information lead-ing to a choice between three destinations. The studyfound that travel sites should ensure that their web pagesare appropriately indexed for easy access and highranking in the result set of a web-based search engine.Pricing and timetable information should also be easy to"nd or stated as not available and destination switchingoccurred if information was lacking or poorly presented.As in Dellaert's study, independent con"rmation of suit-ability from other tourists was seen as an importantfactor in destination choice. The results of Jung's web-based surveys of Internet user's perceptions of Korea asa travel destination follow the patterns observed in typi-cal Internet surveys "nding visitors are pre-dominantlyfrom North America, male and between the ages of 21and 30. Since the majority of current visitors are fromJapan, the web site may provide an opportunity to at-tract a new market of travellers to Korea. Proll et al.proposes an improved interface for a web-based tourisminformation system to support consumer choice in hol-iday package selection. The interface is an improvementover web search engines as it allows tourists to moreeasily locate, customise and book holiday packages as-sembled by a number of suppliers. O'Brien proposes theuse of customer pro"le data and software agents by travelagents to increase the relevance of web search results.The software agent semantically matches traveller prefer-ences to destination and product characteristics. The useof IT to support supplier rather than consumer skills isaddressed by Daniele and Mistilis in a survey of seniormanagers in Australia's tourism and hospitality industry.

The section on engineering tourism applications hasa more technical focus. The Kung et al. paper presentsa hierarchy of tourism speci"c domain concepts that itproposes to use as a basis of building a uniform interfaceto heterogeneous tourism information systems. Unfortu-nately, the authors have misused the OMT modellingtechnique, do not appear to have a clear understandingof the di!erent types of associations it supports, mixrelational and object concepts and do not de"ne and usetheir notation in a consistent manner. A correctly de-signed hierarchy of useful tourism objects could serve asa basis for developing more specialised systems in thisdomain, but not as an `interfacea to heterogeneous sys-tems. The latter would require the use of object requestbrokers (e.g. CORBA) to translate requests between sys-tems developed using di!erent object-oriented program-ming languages. The interface of an object is the set ofmessages it understands, but there is no discussion of thisin the paper. The transformation process seems to sug-gest mapping components of relational queries to a glo-bal schema, a known distributed system technique that isdi$cult to maintain if the participating systems are de-veloped and maintained independently. The paper byHopken, has the same focus as the previous paper but is

more successful. It proposes a workable architecture foran object-oriented reference model to facilitate an integ-rated electronic tourism market. The proposed referencemodel will de"ne a common set of services and a classi-"cation scheme to aid searching for services using fuzzycriteria for determining matches. O'Brien's paper pro-poses using any combination of a number of existing webto database interfacing technologies to build a distrib-uted travel reservation system. Unfortunately, the hardpart is interfacing between heterogeneous systems andthis issue is not addressed. Klabbers and Timmermanshave prototyped an interesting multimedia-based SCAPinterviewing system to collect data on consumer prefer-ences that can be used to determine consumer behaviour.Cettolo et al. propose the use of attribute-value pairs inthe form of an interface format to translate phone con-versations in one language into another language. Thepaper is well written but seems out of place at thisconference as it has very weak ties to tourism. The "nalpaper in this section addresses web-database applica-tions but focuses on gathering data to help tourismsuppliers decide between in-house development versusa buy and customise option. Their results, based onbuilding a prototype similar to TISCover using standardtechnology, are inconclusive.

The section on empowerment of small to mediumtourism enterprises (SMTEs) in Europe through the useof IT deals with the potential bene"ts of using the Inter-net as a low-cost distribution channel for marketinginformation, booking services, electronic invoicing andexpanding customer markets by creating a web presence.SMTEs need to re-engineer their business processes tocompete with larger "rms for a%uent, well-educated con-sumers who prefer the convenience of "nding and book-ing services via the Internet. IT training, awareness of thecapabilities of new technology as well as third-party ITservice providers, a web presence and the development ofcooperative networks for sharing information are sugges-ted by the authors as a means for aiding SMTEs in thisprocess.

The section on the use of IT for hospitality manage-ment begins with two studies to identify factors thatin#uence the success or failure of IT projects. The "rstpilot study is based on a comparison of expected strategicand operational bene"ts with perceptions of post-imple-mentation bene"ts. Initial results are in line with otherstudies on IT implementation success and failure whichbasically imply that if user and budget requirements aremet and adequate training is done, users will usuallyperceive the system as successful. The second study pro-poses a need for a research program to ascertain thesefactors as well as the contribution of IT to productivity.The attitudes and competence of management in theimplementation and ongoing management of computer-based systems are seen to be a major determinant for

104 Book reviews / Tourism Management 22 (2001) 103}112

successful use of IT in the hospitality industry. The "nalpaper in this section suggests that computerisation, apredominantly male management and the imposition oftechnology on a primarily female workforce re#ects theprevailing structures of power but the situation is notevolving as planned. The study found that female opera-tives become so pro"cient at using new technology thatthey develop expertise greater than that of their malemanagers. This results in less need for supervision.Women managers were also found to be more quali"edbut less senior than their male counterparts and to havegreater con"dence in using computer technology. Femi-nine hotels were seen as more successful in using ITe!ectively, recruiting and retaining sta! and in maintain-ing loyal customers.

The "rst study of the next section extends the travellingsalesman problem to trip planning as a means of using ITto redesign travel distribution through the provision ofa decision support system. Whereas most expert systemsthat perform this function are based on emulating humanreasoning patterns, this prototype uses combinatorialoptimisation to select the `besta trip based on minimisingthe costs of transport, activities and lodging while maxi-mising customer preferences for activities and lodging.The model serves as a useful "rst cut, but doesn't accountfor all factors customers may use in making a choice. Thenext study proposes a 2-D framework of categories ofusers versus components of the user interface (interactiondevices and styles, screen design and task models) whichcan be used to classify the user interface con"guration ofvarious types of information and reservation systems.The framework can serve as a "rst step in aiding assess-ment of the user-interface for various user groups in thetourism industry. The "nal case study discusses the bene-"ts of decreased printing, communication and distribu-tion costs as well as improved quality of service AirToursPLC has realised through the implementation of anIntranet.

The "nal section looks at using IT for destinationmarketing systems. The "rst paper proposes using smartcard technology as a means to store customer pro"le andpurchasing behaviour to facilitate information #ow tothe marketing systems used by SMEs and those whomarket them as destinations. Findings of the pilot studysuggest that SMEs in England and Wales rarely usecomputer-based technology, that they do very little stat-istical market analysis and they see the management ofsmart cards as problematic. Cost and lack of expertiseare major barriers here. The second study surveys re-search-oriented users of a Norwegian Tourism Industryextranet, "nding a favourable response and preference fornews and industry statistics. Issues of who will control itscontent and who will "nance it have not yet been ad-

dressed. The third study's abstract contradicts its "nd-ings concerning internet/intranet technology usage byAmerican Convention and Visitors Bureau's (CVBs). Theresults show high usage of email and the web primarilywithin the CVB and with its customers rather than forcoordination with other CVBs. This later point moti-vates the authors to conclude that CVBs have notrealised their full potential since they are not yet part ofthe hypothetical world-wide collaborative network, oftencalled the Global Village by IT management gurus. Sincethe global village is little more than a buzzword andnon-existent to the majority of the world's population,one might instead conclude that the CVBs seem to be ontrack in terms of their stage of development. The actionresearch study by Evans provides an interesting look atthe use of joint web sites and other Internet technologyby SMEs involved in urban tourism in north London.The SMEs in the study formed networks of collaborativerelationships with local enterprises, suppliers and insti-tutes of higher education to facilitate product develop-ment, provide opportunities for market research andreduce barriers to the strategic use of IT. Hart}Nielson'semail survey results recommend using web publishing asa supplementary channel for paper-based publications ofNTO statistics and market intelligence. Advantages ofweb publishing include the ability to provide an on-linesearch facility, fast economical distribution of updatesand the possibility of allowing subscribers to utilise thedata to produce their own outputs. The "nal paper sur-veys destination marketing system stakeholders, "ndingthat technical factors such as reliable, up-to-date accom-modation availability databases and web sites are viewedas more important than management factors.

This collection of papers provides an interestinglook at the numerous ways the tourism industry,primarily in Europe and Asia, is currently usingInternet technology both as a marketing tool and asa way to build a critical mass of SMTEs to realise theeconomies of scale formerly reserved for larger organisa-tions. The majority of organisations studied are in theearly stages of integrating ICT into their business models.Therefore these studies provide interesting reading forpractitioners who are beginning to consider ICT asa strategy for improving customer relationships, utilisingnew distribution channels, improving service o!eringsand avoiding disintermediation by using ICT to theiradvantage.

Ellen RoseInstitute of Information and Mathematical Sciences,

Massey University,Auckland, New Zealand

E-mail address: e.a.rose@massey.ac.nz.

PII: S 0 2 6 1 - 5 1 7 7 ( 0 0 ) 0 0 0 2 8 - 5

Book reviews / Tourism Management 22 (2001) 103}112 105