Sunday 13 November 2011

ICT Tourism Business Platform

Since the Internet became more popular, travel information search and booking has been one of the top five most popular consumers' tasks online. Consumers book flights, hotels and whole package trips online. And even if they decide to make a travel reservation via phone or in person, they often first double check all information on their trip destination as well as hotels, travel companies online. This means that the tourism sector becomes more and more tailor-made to the particular consumer, rather than remaining mass service. It seems that these tailor-made services are often delivered by SMEs instead of big companies, but big companies have an advantage over SMEs of having developed more e-commerce applications and platforms. In order to help SMEs to compete on this market, the European Commission plans to create an ICT and tourism platform (functional by the end of 2012). Such a platform would help SMEs to interconnect via big distribution networks with all important market players and therefore, it would enable their participation in the digital value chain. More on this may be found here.