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E-Tourism

Chapter · January 2015

DOI: 10.13140/2.1.3121.5681

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Bing Pan
Pennsylvania State University
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E-tourism

Also known as travel technology or “e-travel”, e-tourism refers to a phenomenon and

research area in which the adoption of information and communication technology (ICT) by
tourists and businesses transforms the processes and the value chains in the tourism industry.
This development changes the process within a business or organization while reconfiguring the
landscape of commerce (Buhalis 2003).
As a service industry, tourism is specifically influenced and transformed by the
development of ICT. Typically, its products are complex and intangible; their production and
consumption experience are inseparable; its inventories of goods and services are perishable; and
the consumption experience varies depending on the individual tourist at different times. In
addition, the industry is composite in nature and requires great effort in coordinating different
types of services and the delivery of rich information in order to reduce uncertainty during
service encounters. Its businesses need to act swiftly to sell unsold inventories to maximize
revenue and profit. As an information intensive industry, tourism requires the help of ICT, and
the two influence each other. For example, tourism has become the number one e-commerce
category with the largest amount of transactions (Harteveldt, Stark, Sehgal and van Geldern
2009).

Development of e-tourism
The dynamic of e-tourism is closely related to the development of ICT. In the past,
airlines manually managed reservations through a card system, and hotels tracked inventories
through colored tapes posted on walls. As soon as the first electronic general purpose computer,
ENIAC, appeared in 1946, airlines started the wave of adoption: American Airlines installed the
first automated booking system in the same year. Other airlines and hotel chains started to adopt
ICT to build computer reservation systems in the 1960s and 1970s. In the 1980s, such airline
and hotel systems started to merge into global distribution systems, allowing travel agencies to
book multiple services.
During the 1990s, the wide adoption of the Internet created new avenues of distribution
and ways of reaching tourists directly, causing the Internet to start reconfiguring the structure of
tourism sectors (Buhalis and Law 2008). In the early 21st century, social media and mobile
technologies dramatically changed the ways that consumers access information and conduct
transactions, thus changing the power structure and balance between consumers and businesses.
In the early 2010s, the prospect of the application to tourism of tremendous amounts of online
data has the potential of transforming “big data” into knowledge, dramatically enhancing the
tourism experience and providing a deeper understanding of behavioral patterns and the structure
of this industry.

Current technologies
Various typologies of technologies are employed in e-tourism. Consequently, three sub-
areas have emerged: operational tools and systems used by tourism, hospitality businesses, or
organizations to increase efficiency and competitiveness; consumer platforms adopted by tourists
to search information, plan their trips, make purchases, and share experiences; and distribution
and commerce tools which offer distribution channels and mediate the transactions between
tourists and businesses.
Operational technologies involve many systems. A property management system is used
by the accommodation sector for reservations, bookings, point of sale, phone service,
housekeeping, and other services. It often interfaces with other systems such as a global
distribution system, customer relationship management, revenue management, and human
resources. Currently, the most popular property management system is Opera by MICROS-
Fidelio (Nyheim, McFadden and Connolly 2004). A restaurant management system is used in
food or drink enterprises which offers customers and employees with transactions and controls. It
usually includes a point of sale, inventory and menu management, reservation and table
management, and back-office functionality. Customer relationship management refers to an
automated system and process. It focuses on managing customer interactions in order to increase
satisfaction and maximize profits. It could be a part of a property management system or
restaurant management system, or a standalone one, such as Salesforce.com. A revenue
management system helps managers with market segmentation, the forecasting of customer
behavior, and formulating pricing strategies for the purpose of maximizing revenue and profit.
Consumer behavior evolves along with the adoption of new developments. Many studies
have been conducted on online information search through the Internet and on various
information needs. These studies reveal that online resources have replaced word-of-mouth as
the top information source used for gathering tourism information. Some focus on the
information needs, information sources, navigational paths, and attitude changes of online
tourism information search (Pan and Fesenmaier 2006). Others study the usability and
accessibility of a tourism business or organization’s websites. The evaluation of their design has
attracted many empirical studies (Law, Qi and Buhalis 2010).
In addition, tourists share experiences through online platforms, and their perspectives
have gained more trust than traditional marketing messages. For example, TripAdvisor.com
created a shift of power between consumers and businesses. As a result, the former are more
informed and the latter are becoming more transparent (Litvin, Goldsmith and Pan 2008).
However, the trust may vary according to different social media platforms. As a result, social
media marketing has become an emerging area to deal with positive and negative reviews and to
deliver marketing messages to attract more attention.
Furthermore, in 2009, more than 80% of US tourists will use a search engine while
making travel plans. Increasing visibility on search engines includes two aspects: one, search
engine optimization, refers to the practice of tweaking content on one’s website and conducting
link campaigns in order to reach the top positions in organic search results; another aspect, paid
advertising on search engines, refers to the practice of paying for user clicks when a query is
typed into a search engine and an ad is displayed along with the search results. In 2013, the three
major search engines were Google, Bing, and Yahoo!, even though Yahoo! and Bing are both
powered my Microsoft technology. Google and Microsoft have similar but different algorithms
for ranking web pages and estimating advertising cost (Pan, Xiang, Fesenmaier and Law 2011).
Lastly, the adoption of mobile technologies has changed tourists’ experiences. With
access to information virtually at any time and from any place, tourists can make plans en route,
purchase products later in the planning stage, and ease the uncertainty and cultural barriers
associated with tourism. Many mobile apps exist for tourists, including flight trackers,
destination guides, apps from online travel agencies, and attraction guides. Mobile technologies
and especially smart phones are changing the tourist experience and the ways that firms
communicate and do business with their customers (Wang, Park and Fesenmaier 2012).
Distribution technologies have gone through an evolution, but many systems still co-exist
today. Computer reservation systems and global distribution systems are still widely used
(Collins, Cobanoglu and Malik 2008). Online travel agencies are a type of intermediary that
emerged from the wide-adoption of the Internet. They offer a vast range of tourism services from
airlines, hotels, car rentals, events, and activities. Tourists can also freely bundle different
products together. Some were created by software companies. For example, Expedia.com was
created by Microsoft Corporation and later spun off as an independent company. Travelocity was
an extension of Sabre, a global distribution system. Orbitz was started as a partnership among
multiple airlines in the United States in an effort to gain an advantage over then newly appeared
online travel agencies such as Expedia or Travelocity.
One unique online travel agency is Priceline, which specializes in a “name your own
price” system. In this system, tourists can specify the price of hotel rooms, airline seats, or other
services they are looking for, along with the service level and the approximate location. The
matching businesses then decide whether or not to accept the offer. The tourists are not able to
see the exact brand and location of the business until the transaction is complete.
Meta-search engines are aggregates of multiple online agencies and services, such as
Kayak.com and Bing.com/travel. The meta-search engine Kayak.com allows the searching of
hundreds of websites at once and, thus, offers more choices. Users are then directed to the
specific website they have selected to finish the transactions. As such, online commerce and
social media have facilitated the sharing of tourism services and experiences, leading to new
business models involving peer-to-peer communication. Airbnb.com and Couchsurfing.com are
two among many. They exemplify the mix of mediation and distribution systems with customer
involvement and co-creation.
The wide use of ICT by tourism businesses and tourists generates a large amount of data
from information searches, transactions, and spatial movement. Today’s tourists will likely carry
many technology gadgets and use them to interact with ICT resources. A tourist will generate
and contribute a tremendous amount of data, including data points in a tourism website's
analytics data, a hotel mobile app's log data, call center logs, the amount of traffic at a
destination, the sales records of tourism services, search engine query volumes, social media
mentions, location data from cell phones, GPS and photos, etc. All of these are potential
indicators of a tourist's likes and dislikes, motivations, planning behavior, and actual stay
experiences.
“Big data” in tourism and hospitality refers to this deluge of data generated from
ubiquitous computing devices adopted and used by tourists and businesses. The data is getting
too cumbersome and unstructured for traditional database systems to handle and, thus,
specialized software is used to mine trends and correlations. The rich data could provide a
competitive advantage to any business that knows how to utilize it properly. For example, recent
studies have demonstrated the efficacy of using search engine queries or a local destination
marketing organization’s web traffic data to forecast local hotels’ occupancy rates. Many
websites exist on mining social media mentions for businesses and destinations. However, this
field of study is still a nascent area. The combination of different data sources will likely
generate new insights and knowledge and thus provide better experience for tourists and greater
insights for businesses.

Research area of e-Tourism

In general, e-tourism has matured into a well-established sub-discipline with a few
specialized organizations, journals, and conferences, as well as many research articles appearing
regularly. Its organizations include Hospitality Financial & Technology Professionals, the
International Federation for Information Technologies in Travel and Tourism, and the
International Hospitality Information Technology Association. Some have associated
conferences and journals, such as HiTEC, the ENTER eTourism Conference, the iHITA annual
conference, the Journal of Information Technology and Tourism, and the Journal of Hospitality
and Tourism Technology. The sub-discipline of e-tourism has emerged as one of the main
branches of mainstream tourism research rather than a marginal one.

Future research challenges

Emerging e-tourism technologies and systems are always industry-driven. In the future,
this area will continue its usual dynamics and paradigm shifts as new technologies are invented
and widely adopted by businesses and consumers. However, many studies are post-hoc in nature,
studying user adoption and behavior changes after the fact. Innovative and predictive research is
needed to focus on envisioning the future and directing adoptions by working with the industry
on exploring new frontiers. For example, research insights are needed on how different types of
new technologies in the lab stage are relevant to the tourism industry, how to pick and choose
different information systems, and how different online data and insights can be used to inform
future operational and marketing strategies.
See also: Information technology, airline, technology, Internet, e-rating and online review.

References
Buhalis, D.
2003 eTourism: Information Technology for Strategic Tourism Management. Gosport:
Prentice Hall.
Buhalis, D. & Law, R.
2008 Progress in Information Technology and Tourism Management: 20 Years On and
10 Years After the Internet—The State of eTourism Research. Tourism
Management 29:609-623.
Collins, G., Cobanoglu, C. & Malik, T.
2008 Hospitality Information Technology: Learning How to Use it. Dubuque: Kendall.
Harteveldt, H., Stark, E., Sehgal, V., & van Geldern, K.
2009 US Online Leisure Travel Channel Share Forecast: Suppliers versus Intermediaries,
2008 to 2013. Cambridge: Forrester Research.
Law, R., Qi, S. & Buhalis, D.
2010 Progress in Tourism Management: A Review of Website Evaluation in Tourism
Research. Tourism Management 31:297-313.
Litvin, S., Goldsmith, R. & Pan, B.
2008 Electronic Word-of-Mouth in Hospitality and Tourism Management. Tourism
Management 29:458-468.
Nyheim, P., McFadden, F. & Connolly, D.
2004 Technology Strategies for the Hospitality Industry. Prentice-Hall.
Pan, B. & Fesenmaier, D.
2006 Online Information Search: Vacation Planning Process. Annals of Tourism
Research 33:809-832.
Pan, B., Xiang, Z., Fesenmaier, D. & Law, R.
 2011 The Dynamics of Search Engine Marketing for Tourist Destinations. Journal of
Travel Research 50:365-377.
Wang, D., Park, S. & Fesenmaier, D.
2012 The Role of Smartphones in Mediating the Touristic Experience. Journal of Travel
Research 51:371-387.

Bing Pan
College of Charleston, USA
bingpan@gmail.com

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