INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND TOURISM

Tourism is an information business, due to structural reasons. The product itself is a "confidence good"; an a priori complete judgment of its qualities is not possible. At the moment of decisionmaking only information about the product itself available. This role of information explains the importance of IT applications. Consequently tourism was one of the first application fields of huge electronic networks, e.g., the development of CRS/GDS already in the 60s. Today tourism applications play an important role in the Internet/WWW, used for enterprise / industry internal networking as well as for communicating with the consumer. This development has a substantial impact on the industry structure. However, the nature of this sector imposes also serious challenges for IT research and development