Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
the world economy to become so intertwined that seemingly unrelated events in one country
now have huge implications in another. Parallel to this work, a few books and articles focusing
on the role of the Internet in marketing and tourism were written; most important were Poon's
Tourism, Technology and Competitive Strategies
(1993)
, Sheldon's Tourism Information Technology
(1997)
and Werthner and Klein's
Information Technology and Tourism
-
A Challenging Relationship
(1999);
early marketing articles by Hoffman and Novak (1996), Novak and Hoffman (1996), and in
tourism by Buhalis (1998, 2000), Gretzel, Yuan and Fesenmaier (2000) and Yuan, Gretzel and
Fesenmaier (2003) are examples that refl ect the 'new' thinking regarding the nature and impact
of the Internet.
During this fi rst decade of the Internet (roughly 1991-2002), the tourism industry became
one of the leaders in the use of the Internet whereby industry leaders began to realize that they
were largely information arbitrators, and that the Internet enabled them to communicate easily
and effectively with their existing and potential customers. Also, importantly, many envisioned
new ways of meeting the information needs of this market where websites replaced travel
brochures for essentially every destination and attraction, and for every travel-related service
worldwide. In the United States, for example, virtually every tourism organization had developed
a website by the early 2000s, and many had gone through the evolution from a simple 'electronic
brochure' to highly interactive systems that supported reservations, search and even virtual tours;
importantly, the website had become the primary (and in many circumstances, the only) source
of contact with potential visitors (Zach, Gretzel and Xiang 2010). In retrospect, this transformation
is easily understood as the computer framework already existed through the various global
distribution systems (GDSs) linking travel agencies to the airlines. Also during this time,
many innovative destination marketing organizations (DMOs) began to realize their new role as
partners within the 'tourism system' wherein they became 'information brokers' as they sought
to develop and coordinate a range of new systems that would be used by their stakeholders
(Gretzel and Fesenmaier 2002; Wang and Xiang 2007).
The decade of the 1990s was also a time where the leaders of the tourism industry began to
understand and appreciate that travel experiences are 'products' that can be bundled and sold.
Exemplifi ed by the success of
The Experience Econom
y by Pine and Gilmore (1999), the core
business model of many/most tourism organizations changed. With this new perspective on the
core product, the tourism industry is challenged to recognize that the 'new consumer' demands
highly personalized experiences, that competition for visitors would now be waged in global
markets, and that the traveller somehow was in the position to 'control' this new marketplace.
Traditional travel agencies were decimated by newly formed online fi rms such as Expedia and
Travelocity; the large travel suppliers such as airlines and hotels could connect directly with
potential customers; search engines such as Google became dominant as they provided instant
access to websites, and therefore could be indexed, advertised and managed; on top of all this,
meta search engines such as Kayak further made the distribution of travel products more
accessible and more transparent. In response, DMOs were forced to recalibrate again their role
to become a different kind of intermediary whereby they largely focused on building the
capacity necessary to assist small and medium tourism fi rms in adapting to this new and very
challenging environment. And, as a result, they became destination managers. In effect, they had
to change their business model to focus on creating new forms of value within the tourism chain
(Wilson, Fesenmaier, Fesenmaier and van Es 2001).
Interestingly, the second decade (2001-present) was a time of even greater change for tourism
marketing where the focus of technology change emerged from development (i.e. growth in the
number of websites) and usability to one of persuasion and customer empowerment, and more
recently to ubiquity through mobile systems. That is, while many of the core industry changes
