Addressing developing trends in tourism: Information and communication technology Noel Scott Noreen Breakey With help from: Juan Wang, Yao Ma, Meng Bo Liu, Yujing Zhang, and Xin Tu

Introduction In developing and managing tourism destinations it is necessary to undertake a strategic approach to planning and to proactively scan the environment, identify trends and then develop plans to address them. Such a strategic approach is by no means without criticism. However such an approach, may help avoid ‘strategic drift’ when an organization’s strategy fails to address new developments in the business environment (Johnson, 1988). A recent paper has examined the trends in the macro environment for tourism using the STEEP model (STEEP is an acronym for Socio-cultural, Technological, Economic, Environmental and Political factors) has identified a number of key drivers of change (Dwyer, Edwards, Mistilis, Roman, & Scott, 2009). This paper focuses on one of these: Information and communication technologies (ICT) and discusses some effects on ICT on tourism organizations. Through this analysis it then focuses on some critical issues where there appears some business failure and suggests a number of activities that may be undertaken to address these issues by destination managers based in Australia. It also provides some initial assessment of website marketing in one town in Chile; San Pedro de Atacama.

ICT developments and effects on tourism New technologies provide businesses with the tools to stimulate tourism purchases, achieve reduce operating costs and increase their effectiveness. At the same time, interactive access to product offering via the Internet gives tourists unprecedented control over how they spend their time and money both allowing small tourism business operators access to a global market as well as competing with tourism by delivering new forms of entertainment in or near the consumer’s home (D. Buhalis, 2003). Given the rapidly changing technology and opportunities ICT provides, it is important to develop a more focused understanding of ICT developments. One study of leading-edge developments in tourism ICT and related underlying technologies has recently been undertaken by the STCRC focusing on three areas web-based intelligent systems (WISEs), location-based systems (LBSs) and usability engineering (UE) (Sharda, et al., 2006). Buhalis (2008) provides a summary of more recent developments including interoperability and ontology, multimedia, mobile and wireless technologies, web design in both functionality and usability and proposes the future development of ambient intelligence. One way to better understand the impact of ICT in tourism is to examine how the introduction of ICT has affected the various stakeholders in the tourism sector. For potential travellers, new technologies have revolutionised how they research travel options, compare prices and book their travel. For travellers on their trip the availability of information and contact with their home through the internet, the use of mobile phones and geographic location services based on Global Positioning Satellites (GPS) has increase the convenience, pleasure and security of travel. For tourism operators, ICTs have affected the way they market their products as well as offering opportunities to change the way they operate (Buhalis and Deimezi, 2003). ICT puts marketing opportunities in the hands of each and every business owner, thus increasing not only the offer to the consumer but the competition amongst the industry and destinations. For tourism intermediaries such as travel agents and wholesalers, the introduction of ICTs have changed the nature of competition, led to new business models such as the offering of last minute ‘distressed stock’ over the WWW and the ability for consumers to compare prices and book, as well as creating new opportunities for relationship marketing. For tourism organizations at the local (LTO), state (STO) and national level (NTO), it has meant a change in the skills required of staff, their promotion and marketing techniques, and their customer research methods. It has also raised the need for a change in the services offered by STOs to include ICT training and education for operators and the development of cooperative data services such as that provided by the Australian Tourism Data Warehouse (ATDW). For governments, ICT has raised important policy issues related to taxation, legal jurisdiction, amongst others. Consideration of this use of ICTs suggests that the various technologies may not be equally applicable to all types of operators. Thus hand held terminals for data entry may be useful for restaurants and car rental companies but not particularly useful for small Bed and Breakfast establishments. Similarly, virtual reality applications may be useful for large attractions but not affordable (at the moment) for smaller attractions. As will be discussed below there are marked differences in the potential and actual value that SMTEs see in the various ICT.

Establishing the ATDW and TXA The internet has developed as a critical tool for visitors in collecting information about their trip, and as a result a strategic initiative was developed to provide a way to ensure information was accurate and also that small tourism operators were not disadvantaged. The ATDW is the combined effort of all Australian state and territory tourism offices, as well as Tourism Australia. It operates to provide industry with a national database of tourism products and destinations so that they can be published, promoted and sold through multiple websites and other digital media. The ATDW is the only government recognised nation-wide distribution facility for Australian tourism content. The database has more than 26,000 listings and 80,000 images that are quality assured and updated daily by state tourism offices to ensure accuracy and relevance to the customer who views the information. Once the tourism product listing is submitted to the ATDW national database it is then published through ATDW distributors who make up online tourism marketers and other digital publishers that promote tourism products and destinations through their websites. ATDW distributors may also sell the tourism suppliers’ inventory (rooms, tours, events, and attractions) online using ATDW’s inclusive booking platform, the Tourism Exchange Australia (TXA). To respond to the demand of travellers who would like to be able to not only read about different tourism experiences but also book them online, the ATDW has set up the Tourism Exchange Australia (TXA). The TXA allows multiple booking systems to connect at the same time and sell your inventory (rooms, tours, events, attractions) instantly online through ATDW’s many distributors. This gives you, as the tourism supplier, the opportunity to sell your rooms, tours, events or attractions online through several websites with little effort and without the trouble of phone call or email bookings. The TXA looks after the transactions for you while bookings are being made through multiple websites.

ICT adoption by SMTEs The implementation of the ATDW and ATX highlighted the lack of ICT knowledge and skills of STMEs and led to an examination of the process of developing websites and how SMTE managers’ ICT skills can be developed. There are many published models that document how a ‘typical’ small business (a business with 1-20 employees for the purposes of this article) might build its website over time. Some of these are known as ‘staged’ website development models. This development process is argued to be progressive, where the early stages of the web presence are typified by a simple ‘brochure’ type website, whilst later stages provide small businesses with advanced website features such as enhanced publishing opportunities, improved business promotion and interactive after sales support. At the most advanced stage, website complexity is typically reflected by having online customer order/payment processes that can mature to become fully integrated with ‘back office’ systems (D Buhalis & Deimezi, 2004; Burgess & Cooper, 2001). Buhalis and Deimezi (2004) suggest that seven discrete stages in the adoption of websites may be envisaged (Figure 1).

Figure 1 A stages model of website development for SMTEs (D Buhalis & Deimezi, 2004). Research by McGrath (2006) indicates that there is a major or partial gap by all types of tourism services in the effective usage of the Internet. It is well-known that the rate of adoption of ICTs in SMEs is lower than that of larger businesses although the gap is narrowing. In a recent study in Australia, data 41 Victoria and South Australia businesses were asked to identify the areas where they received their primary benefits from use of ICT. The two major areas were marketing and customer service (see Table 1). However, there was a reduction in the importance of marketing for less skilled managers. As a result training was considered important for managers of SMTEs.

Table 1: Where ICTs provide most value by area Operational area

ICT skill classification (%)

Overall Percentage

Upper (13)

Middle (20)

Lower (7)

Marketing

62

55

29

52

Customer Service

18

35

43

30

Finance/ Accounting

8

10

29

13

New product/ service development

-

-

-

-

Supply chain

-

-

-

-

Manufacturing

8

-

-

3

HRM

-

5

-

-

Other

-

5

-

3

Source Scott, et al.(2009) One implication of a study of the issues facing the tourism sector in Australia was that education and training is needed to foster a more innovative tourism workforce to achieve destination competitive advantage (Dwyer, et al., 2009, p. 68) and tourism firms must appreciate the importance of life-long learning and 'top-up' of skills through training. One first step is to identify operator skills through an audit and for a discussion of options for such a study see a recent paper by Scott, et al. (2009).

Improving website marketing The stages model of website development for SMTEs shown in Figure 1 provides a technology based viewpoint of the path for SMTEs to take in adding value to their business through use of website related technology. Indeed much research has been conducted on the layout, design and functionality of websites. Factors such as font size, colour and design, content, images and presence of online booking systems are particularly important. However there is little academic literature on how customers find a website to look at and how to market a website to ensure a particular site is easily found. Significantly a large majority of tourism customers use a search engine as their initial start point. Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the process of improving a website so it ranks high in search engine results when someone who doesn’t know your business searches for a service or product. Having an optimised website means a site is visible online. A number of website related terms are defined in Table 2. Table 2 Common website related terms Blogs

Blogs (short for weB LOGS) are online journals or diaries hosted on a web server. They are used as both an education and marketing tool, allowing better positioning in search engine through linking strategies and keyword optimisation. Blog content is distributed to an unlimited number of websites via syndication (RSS, Search engines) and online communities. Sources estimated 200 million blogs in existence in 2006, and doubling approximately every 6 months in the last 2 years.

Collaborative publishing

Collaborative publishing systems are platforms that attempt to tap the expertise of a group rather than an individual to make decision. They also allow many authors to contribute to an online document. A well-known example of this is Wikipedia, part of the Wikis family. In the travel and tourism industry, one of the key players is Tripadvisor (www.tripadvisor.com).

Content subscription systems

Content subscription systems such as Rss feeds. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) allows people to subscribe to online distributions of news, blogs, podcasts, or other information. Feedburner is the main tool allowing to create feeds. The travel marketer can develop as many RSS feeds as required from each site of relevance and users can subscribe to them, accessing them via a customisable homepage that resembles an email inbox.

Dynamic packaging

Travel agents have been highly affected by changes in tourism industry by reduced commissions. They therefore look for new ways to increase their margins: e.g. acquiring tools to dynamically package their client’s holiday requirements. Examples of dynamic packaging in the travel and tourism industry are Expedia, Travelocity.

Internet Forums

An Internet forum is ‘an online facility that provides local businesses with an internet portal using the locale, or an industry particular to the locale, as the unique selling point, or common brand’. This acts as an anchor providing more of a profile to entice visitors to the web site that represents the location or destination.

Linking destination websites

Linking to related websites is important to promote tourist destinations.

Mash-ups

Mash-ups are aggregations of content from different online sources to create a new service. An example of this would be pulling apartment listings from one site and plotting them on a Google map to show where the apartments are located.

Ontology

An ontology-based eTourism Planner such as AuSTO that enables users to create itinerary in one single application by this intelligent tool that builds on semantic web technologies

Podcasting

Podcasts are a multimedia form of a blog or other content (audio or video recordings). They are generated by Internet users and They are often distributed through an aggregator, such as iTunes. The advantage of podcasts is that they are downloadable onto a mobile device and allow the user to listen or view them at their own convenience, whilst driving for instance.

Relationship marketing

Collaborative filtering, popularized by Amazon.com, makes recommendations based on users' shared preferences. For example, if you bought a book about fly fishing and we know that many other people who bought that book also purchased biographies of Teddy Roosevelt, then we'll recommend that you buy a book on Teddy Roosevelt, too. (Vendors: Net Perceptions, Macromedia). Data Mining/Analytics uses data analysis, including online traffic patterns, past purchases, customer records, etc. to make predictions of future customer behavior. Rules-Based Engines personalize content by automating business rules into intelligent self-service products. Customers are served up content only if it is relevant to them based on their unique preferences or specific needs.

Search engines

Search Engines are the “information crawlers” of the 21st century. They arrange the Information and present it in a ready to be read format. Search engines are now reaching a use almost as high as email

with over 60 million of US Internet Users relying on them on a daily basis. In the Web 2.0 era, Search Engine Optimisation and Search Engine Marketing are the two disciplines that solely focus on working with search engines to promote a website, blog on other user generated content over the Internet. The key player in the search industry is Google – referencing half of the 200 billion existing numbers of web pages on the Internet. Even though Google is by far the most used engine with 50% of the searches, it is being followed by competitors such as Yahoo! Search, MSN / Live Search, and others. Social networking

Social software practices including blogs, message boards and consumer review sites. Social media platforms such as Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn allow the user to connect with friends and like-minded individuals, often on the form of online communities and to develop a network that can be used for social and or business purposes. An instance of this in the travel and tourism industry is the T-list community on Facebook where online marketing professionals specialising on the travel & tourism industry form a group and exchange ideas and best practices.

Tours using mobile devices

Mobile devices are increasingly being used by tourists as electronic personal tour guides.

VOIP

The ever-increasing connection speeds have allowed for a new form of telephone technology, VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol). VoIP has been initiated by Internet applications like Skye, allowing to telephone for free from computer to computer.

Wireless & Mobile Platforms

Wireless is likely to be the next major event in the history of technology. Its application in tourism industry is also likely to increase in future. Mobile services shall continue to be an important channel of information and tourism services distribution for both providers and consumers. Future mobiles might decrease in size, weight ad prize and likely to increase in power, storage, connectivity, position and capabilities. Electronic personal guide might be in frequent usage. Besides SMS (short message services), WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) standard for accessing the Internet with wireless devices like mobile phones should be increased. GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System), which gives the position and GPRS (General Packet Radio Services) enabled mobiles which can handle larger amounts of data than the GSM network shall be useful in tourism industry. W-LAN (Wireless Local Area Networks) and Blue tooth, which gives wireless access at short distance about few meters, can be useful too.

Increasing website visibility can be done in a number of ways including: •

Naming page headings in a structured way and adding meta description tags to images;

•

Submitting a site to a search engine;

•

Researching and using popular key words;

•

Increasing the number of relevant inbound and outbound links on your website. Search engines use inbound links to a website to gauge its popularity and importance.

•

Marketing your product through participation in blogs, internet forums and other forms of social media;

•

Issuing media releases online;

•

Ask for E-Mail Sign-ups from your site visitors and develop an email strategy;

•

Using banner advertising and pay per click;

•

Managing customer reviews and TripAdvisor.

•

Use Viral Marketing.

A well designed set of notes (in English) useful for SMTEs on that discusses internet marketing may be found at are available at http://www.atdw.com.au/tourism_e_kit.asp (Australian Tourism Data Warehouse, 2009). A number of tools are available to help with tracking your website performance such as Google Analytics http://www.google.com/analytics/

Viral marketing As an example of the implementation of web-marketing, a brief discussion of a recent Tourism Queensland marketing programme is provided using viral marketing to spread the word exponentially. An example is provided by the Tourism Queensland ‘Best Job in the World’ campaign.

Figure 2 ‘Best Job in the World’ advertisement This campaign was launched on January 2009 and as at July 13th www.islandreefjob.com had received 8.2 million website visitors, 54.4 million page views with 8.24 minutes on average spent on site. The audience was international with 25.2% of site visitors from the USA, 8.2% from Canada, 6.7% from Taiwan, and 6.4% from the UK. There was a significant flow on effect to the Tourism Queensland website as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3 Visits to www.tq.com.au January 2009

Results of examination of San Pedro de Atacama websites To examine the development of website marketing in Chile, students from The University of Queensland School of Tourism were asked to evaluate the 10 websites from businesses located in San Pedro de Atamata, Chile. A recent online article has listed 37 ways to improve a website’s marketing (www.wilsonweb.com/articles/checklist.htm) and divides these into four parts: Search Engine Strategy, Linking Strategy, Traditional Marketing Strategy and E-mail Strategy. Students were restricted to examining only individual websites and its links. Based on this restriction, 20 indicators grouped into three parts: Search Engine Strategy, Linking Strategy, and E-mail Strategy were used to evaluate the website marketing of selected business in San Pedro de Atamata. The web tool – www.alexa.com was used to obtain data of the traffic rank and the number of links of our websites and the results are shown in Table 3. Table 3 Website statistics No. of links from others

No. of indicators (18)

481,251

627

10

6,800,501

24

5

http://www.tulor.cl/ingles/index.htm

13,174,511

8

3

http://www.dontomas.cl/index_inglish.html

15,390,979

20

4

http://www.desertadventure.cl/eng/index.html

17,204,086

10

5

http://www.lodgealtitud.cl/i_lodge01.html

18,490,267

3

3

http://www.cactustour.cl

25,300,579

2

4

http://www.atacamahorseadventure.com/en/about-us/

26,435,554

2

6

http://www.eltatio.com/ingles/hotel.html

29,182,199

6

5

http://www.rancho-cactus.cl/

30,035,354

4

3

Website evaluated

http://www.explora.com/ http://www.altiplanico.cl/En/Sanpedro/sanpedro.html

Traffic rank

Source: www. alexa.com Traffic rank and number of links may be used to evaluate the websites accessibility. Table 3 shows the traffic rank, number of links and the number of indicators (out of 18) for each site. The same indicator information is presented in Table 4 for each website.

Table 4 Number of websites with each indicator

Indicators

Search Engine Friendly

Links Strategy

No of Websites (10)

Write a keyword-Rich Page Title

-

Write a Description META Tag

2

Include your keywords in Headers (H1, H2, and H3)

3

Position your keywords in the first paragraph of your body text

5

Include Descriptive keywords in the ALT( Attribute of Image Tags)

2

Use keyword in hyperlinks

1

Make your navigation system search engine friendly

8

Create a site map

0

Link to local business on the internet

5

Promote your video\images and audio content

2

Submit your site to key Directories

1

Submit your site to trade organization sites and specialized Directories

10

Request reciprocal links

0

Write articles for others to use in websites and newsletters

3

Begin a business Blogs - link on website

2

Become part of a social media community

1

Promote your site in online Forums and discussion lists

1

Aggressively ask for E-Mail Sign-ups

2

Newsletter E-mail

These results indicate that most of the websites examined haven’t done much links marketing and have only submit their web address to some trade directories. Many websites also have attractive

photos but do not promote them outside their websites. It would appear that there are improvements that can be made to optimise the marketing of websites for businesses in San Pedro de Atacama.

M commerce and mobile phones The final ICT development that is examined here is M-commerce. M-commerce has been defined as the use of a wireless terminal, such as a cellular telephone or personal digital assistant (PDA), and a network, to access information and conduct transactions that result in the transfer of value in exchange for information, services or goods (E-commerce Working Party, 2004). M-Commerce services cover communication, information, transaction and entertainment. A number of essential characteristics differentiate the mobile data network from non-mobile commerce other than merely ‘mobility’. They are immediacy, context and location. Immediacy refers to the ability to access the Internet and communicate voice and data information instantly, without being bound to a fixed location. Communications networks such as those utilising satellite technologies also mitigate the restrictions on mobile devices in remote areas, ie ‘satphones’ which operate to geostationary satellites. The issue of context is also greatly enhanced in relation to the use of mobile devices. In fact, one of the most important issues for wireless application developers is the perceived dynamics between the user and context. Context can include environmental factors (e.g. physical location, distraction, crowding), social context (e.g. need for privacy and interaction with others) and personal factors (e.g. emotion, time on hand, movement). Mobile devices can be used in a variety of contexts; travelling to work, relaxing in a café, or, waiting at an airport. As a result, mobile device users have a tendency to accomplish specific tasks that have meaning within that particular context. For instance, consumers most frequently used mobile devices when they had more time on hand or were off duty, and had little social interaction, distraction or crowding. Moreover, mobile devices are not normally shared, so they tend to carry some personal identity. For instance, the huge revenue from sale of mobile phone ringtones and logos illustrates users’ attempts to personalise generic handsets. Mobile devices can also enable user locationidentification. Not only can users engage in ‘where am I’ and ‘where is this’ –type services, but network providers are able to identify the user’s location. Thus, in some circumstances, this information can be passed on to third parties, such as emergency services. Of course, this unique aspect of wireless communication has significant implications for privacy and security. Table 5 Overview of the seven general types of wireless applications

Application 1. Time–critical services.

2. Location–aware services.

and

Examples SMS alerts for airline flight changes. ‘Where am I?’ type services. Point of need information (targeting location–sensitive advertisements). Niche consumer applications (golf course assistant). Corporate applications (staff tracking).

3. Identity–enacted services.

Mobile banking and micro–payments.

4. Ubiquitous communications.

Voice and data products.

5. Content delivery services.

Wireless service.

6. Business process (e.g. RFID technology).

news/destination

subscription

Enterprise resource planning. streamlining Supply chain management applications. Enhanced customer relationship management.

7. Mobile offices and personal information PDAs. management. Source: After Gould, Jackson, Van Schyndel, & O'Donnell,(2006) In Australia, a number of factors such as the implementation of 3G networks and the success of the Apple i-phone suggest that mobile phone broadband usage will increase fairly rapidly and will likely double in number of users in 2009. More problematic is what mobile phone users will use their broadband connection to purchase. At the heart of this question is the ability of tourism suppliers to develop reasonably priced convenience based products. An example of this is the use of the location of the phone (i.e. GPS) and identity and characteristics of the owner to ‘push’ service offerings to the phone. Thus it is likely that use of mobile phones as a medium for marketing and promotion will increase in future using geographical location as a target selection criteria. A number of other services could be envisaged that use the identity of the phone owner and their preferences as well as location to create a ‘push’ service offering but the required identity features are not implemented on mobile phones yet. In the absence of such new services it may be expected that growth will be slower (akin to the uptake of e-commerce) and more targeted to particular convenience orientated and less price sensitive markets, especially 18-30 year old employed people (with a female bias). In this scenario, mcommerce will be a differentiator and development tool for aggressive operators for (say) 3-5 years. While some overseas countries are more advanced in implementation of m-commerce, technological and cost barriers indicate that overseas tourists to Australia will not develop the required mass market either. While the above suggests that the timing of mass uptake of m-commerce is, in Australia, probably at least 3-5 years away, in the absence of a compulsive ‘killer application’, it is strongly recommended that innovation and development of new products and services begins as soon as possible. The lead time for implementation of such new products is probably of the order of 2-3 years, although trials of push m-marketing could start sooner. Certainly there is a need for monitoring of m-commerce products and services offered both in Australia and in other countries.

Conclusion Based on this discussion we may conclude that there is a continual need for strategic scanning and indepth analysis of technological developments for their effect on tourism. A proactive approach is recommended and some interventions in Queensland and Australia have been discussed. In particular internet marketing and training is important for tourism SMTEs and some evidence of areas where internet marketing in Chile can be improved has been presented. The development of ICT and its application to tourism appears a rich area for further research.

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