Advancing European tourism into the next century
Tourism is a crucial industry in Europe. It is predominantly driven by SMEs, which comprise the majority of the industry. Tourism currently employs over 8 million Europeans and may account for more than 5% of the Gross Domestic Product. These figures are expected to increase over the next decade. However, the tourism industry may be easily affected by social, political and economic events, such as regional conflicts. These circumstances have forced many members of the tourism supply chain to re-evaluate their position and market tactics. The supply chain has, until now, been disjointed. Everyone sells their own individual tourism products, yet very few combine their various components into a harmonised vacation package. A project funded by the Information Society Technologies sought to redress this problem through means of technology. Intelligent software agents are exploited to turn customer queries into complete vacation solutions. An underlying database contains modules for all potential elements of a vacation. These include travel by air, train, water and car as well as hotel accommodations, restaurants, yacht chartering, excursions and so on. The innovation behind the system is that it combines many divergent sub-products into a final product, resulting in a significantly increased value for the traveller. There are no pre-existing packages, rather the user creates their own package based on their individual needs and desires. The new software system is able to provide services over both local Intranets and the Internet. It is based on the latest software development technologies, such as Microsoft InterDev and Microsoft Transactional SQL Servers. The participation of several tourism suppliers in the project trial ensured the usability of the results. The German SME that developed the software is targeting potential users within the tourism supply chain. It can be sold either as a complete system or as a selection of the underlying modules. Partners who can assist in the promotion of this new tool, and who can help further both the European tourism industry and European SMEs, are also sought.
