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throughout the tourism industry and no player can escape its impact”
(Poon, 1993, p.123).
Unlike durable goods, intangible tourism services cannot be physically
displayed or inspected at the point of sale before purchasing. They are
bought before the time of their use and away from the place of consump-
tion. Hence they depend exclusively upon representation and descriptions,
provided by the travel trade for their ability to attract consumers. Timely
and accurate information, relevant to consumers' needs, is often the key
to satisfaction of tourist demand. Therefore, ICT provides the information
backbone that facilitates tourism (Buhalis, 1998, p. 411).
The cyberspace travel market is characterized by steady growth in dif-
ferent countries. On-line sales accounted for 14.4% of the American mar-
ket—a massive shift to online travel, which is being repeated in other parts
of the world. However, online services have yet to take off in the huge
Asian market. Global Internet users reached 1.4 billion, of which 65% was
located in Asia, by 2009, according to Yahoo! South-east Asia at the Trav-
el Distribution Summit Asia 2006 (European Travel Commission—New
Media Review, 2006). Yahoo! South-east Asia believes that Asia Pacific
is expected to account for 423 million Internet users, excluding China, of
the total 1 billion base. In Europe online services were growing rapidly
(Economist.com, 2005). In 2005, the number of visitors to travel websites
in America grew by 12.7%. This compares with an increase of almost 30%
in the number of visitors to British websites.
The wider availability of e-tickets should speed the development of
online travel everywhere. It spread even faster once paperless tickets be-
came more widely accepted for so-called 'interline agreements,' in which
a ticket issued by one carrier is valid on another carrier for part of the
journey (Economist. com, 2005). Furthermore, all major airlines switched
to e-ticketing by 2007.
There are, of course, variations between countries, with the UK ac-
counting for 39% of the European on-line travel market followed by Ger-
many in second place at 23%. According to the research, Germany had the
fastest growing on-line travel market in Europe; the breakdown by type
of service was: air travel 57.3%, hotels 14.4%, package tours 16.5%, rail
8.4%, rental cars 2.1%, and other services 1.5% (Marcussen, 2004).
Different sectors of the tourism industry are characterized by different
levels of ICT adoption. Airlines realized fairly early the need for efficient,
quick, and inexpensive systems. In 1962, American Airlines introduced
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