Maria Lexhagen

Swedish and Norwegian Tourism Websites: The Importance of Reservation Services and Value-added Services

Owing to their intangible and digital character, tourism products in the future are likely to be traded on the electronic marketplace. Travel agencies and tour operators may no longer be needed because tourists will communicate directly with hotels and airlines electronically. To attract customers to the electronic marketplace, tourism business websites will have to offer reservation facilities and value-added services, and to attain disintermediation in the electronic marketplace, tourism businesses, e.g. hotels and airlines, will have to offer services similar to those offered by intermediaries such as travel agencies and tour operators if they are to reduce what customers perceive as risks. In this article, a theoretical framework related to on-line reservations and on-line value-added services in the tourism industry is developed and on this basis six propositions are presented. Results from a content analysis of Swedish and Norwegian tourism websites reveal that while tourism businesses offer some reservation services, only to a limited extent do they offer value-added services on the electronic marketplace. Traditional intermediaries such as tour operators and travel agencies offer more value-added services on the electronic marketplace than airlines and hotels. The implications of the results are discussed.

The importance of value-added services to support the customer search and purchase process on travel websites.

This article explores one potential reason for the on-line tourism markets slower than expected growth rate. It investigates to what extent value added services provided by websites for tour operators and travel agencies are actually perceived as important by the customer in the search and purchase process. An adapted version of a consumer decision process model is used and the results are based on a web survey. The results show that most value added services are perceived to be most important in the search and/or purchase phase and that no value added services are perceived to be most important in the post consumption phase. Based on this it is suggested that travel websites should try and develop more value added services aimed at supporting the customer in the post consumption phase in order to build strong customer relationships and loyalty which may lead to continuous buying behaviour.

Sentiment Analysis: Extracting Decision-Relevant Knowledge from UGC

Electronically available user generated content (UGC) dramatically increased in recent years and constitutes a highly relevant information source not only for other customers but also for tourism suppliers. Customer needs and their perception of consumed products can be extracted from UGC and represent a valuable input to product enhancement and customer relationship management. A prerequisite to that end is an automatic extraction of decision-relevant knowledge from UGC with a sufficient quality. This paper presents a novel approach for extracting decision-relevant knowledge from UGC and compares different underlying data mining techniques concerning their accuracy in topic and sentiment detection of textual user reviews. The complete extraction process is implemented and evaluated in the context of the Swedish mountain tourism destination Are.

Web Usage Mining in Tourism : A Query Term Analysis and Clustering Approach

According to current research, one of the most promising applications for web usage mining (WUM) is in identifying homogenous user subgroups (Liu, 2008). This paper presents a prototypical workflow and tools for analyzing user sessions to extract business intelligence hidden in web log data. By considering a leading Swedish destination gateway, we demonstrate how query term analysis in combination with session clustering can be utilized to effectively explore the information needs of website users. The system thus overcomes many of the limitations of typical web site analysis tools that only offer general statistics and ignore the opportunities offered by unsupervised learning techniques.

The knowledge destination — a customer information-based destination management information system

Huge amounts of customer-based data, such as tourists’ website navigation, transaction and survey data are available in tourism destinations, however, remain largely unused (Pyo, 2002). This paper presents the concept of a knowledge-based destination management information system (DMIS) that supports value creation through enhanced decision making. Information is extracted from heterogeneous data sources of the Swedish tourism destination of Are and is categorized in explicit feedback (e.g. survey data) and implicit information traces (e.g. navigation and transaction data). Methods of business intelligence are applied to retrieve interesting data patterns, thus, to generate knowledge in the form of empirically validated models. The paper deduces new insights about the applicability of data mining techniques and related models at tourist destinations depending on the type of tourism data and concrete problem characteristics at hand (Pick & Schell, 2002).

Customer Perceived Value of Travel and Tourism Web Sites

The continuing development and growth of the Internet imply that business and customers perceive that the Internet provides them with some kind of value. The Internet has also seen an increasing importance of user-generated content and utilisation of the Internet as a social medium. In this study the concept of customer value, based on the typology of consumer value (Holbrook, 1994; 1999) and the value hierarchy model (Woodruff & Gardial, 1996; Woodruff, 1997), is used to identify dimensions and expressions of what customer-perceived value is in travel and tourism web sites and how it is created. Moderately structured in-depth interviews are used to collect data. In the analysis connections between different types of value are presented and the lack of certain types of value is discussed.

Overcoming barriers to SME e-commerce adoption using blended learning: a Swedish action research case study.

Overcoming barriers to SME e-commerce adoption using blended learning : - a Swedish action research case study

Business intelligence for cross-process knowledge extraction at tourism destinations

Decision-relevant data stemming from various business processes within tourism destinations (e.g. booking or customer feedback) are usually extensively available in electronic form. However, these data are not typically utilized for product optimization and decision support by tourism managers. Although methods of business intelligence and knowledge extraction are employed in many travel and tourism domains, current applications usually deal with different business processes separately, which lacks a cross-process analysis approach. This study proposes a novel approach for business intelligence-based cross-process knowledge extraction and decision support for tourism destinations. The approach consists of (a) a homogeneous and comprehensive data model that serves as the basis of a central data warehouse, (b) mechanisms for extracting data from heterogeneous sources and integrating these data into the homogeneous data structures of the data warehouse, and (c) analysis methods for identifying important relationships and patterns across different business processes, thereby bringing to light new knowledge. A prototype of the proposed concepts was implemented for the leading Swedish mountain destination Åre, which demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed business intelligence architecture and the gained business benefits for a tourism destination.

Multi-dimensional data modelling for a tourism destination data warehouse

Information and communication technologies (ICTS) play a crucial role to increase the knowledge base of destination stakeholders. Organisational learning and managerial effectiveness can particularly be enhanced by applying methods of business intelligence (BI). Although huge amounts of data are available in tourism destinations these valuable knowledge sources typically remain unused. The described problem is solved by conceptualizing, prototypically implementing and testing a novel destination management information system (DMIS) that applies methods of BI and data warehousing for the leading Swedish ski destination, Are. As being a central DMIS component, the destination-wide data warehouse (DW), its underlying multi-dimensional data model, the technical architecture, as well as critical implementation issues are discussed. Finally, the prototypical implementation of the DMIS focussing on the data warehouse and OLAP functionalities for customer feedback processes proved the suitability and effectiveness of the proposed overall architecture.

Festival coordination : An exploratory study on intention to use mobile devices for coordination of a festival

In this study we focus on the use of a mobile coordination service used to coordinate Storsjoyran a music festival held yearly in Ostersund in Sweden. A description of the mobile service is given, and an empirical study focusing on users motives for using the mobile coordination service is reported. The results point to the importance of developing mobile coordination services that are perceived as enjoyable and useful to motivate usage among festival staff.