Tourism is a unique product that involves the exchange of intangible dreams and experiences that can be memorable for a lifetime. People spend a lot of their disposable income to travel to places they always have dreamed of or to simply have a weekend away or a summer break somewhere nice and warm. When people are looking at holiday packages, they have no idea of what is behind the processes and the transactions that were involved in finding their perfect getaway. Traditionally, customers were only able to select their holidays by using brochures or physically visiting travel agencies. However, today all the information they need can be found online, using the internet as a tool to compare prices, suppliers, availabilities, service features and add-ons for their packages, all this at their fingertip, argues Buhalis and Costa (2006) on their edited book Tourism Management Dynamics: trends, management and tools. The idea of a customer centric information system is one of the most popular business concepts today since all purposeful systems should respond to the consumer needs and wants by providing them with high valuable services, explains Alter (2014). Tourism organizations have been adapting really well to this concept of customer centric IS by developing technology-supported systems that give personalized services that direct to individual needs. They must collect information from their customers on every stage of the customer journey – before, during and after a visit – in order to learn their behavior and choices. Creating a personalized service by using customer relationship management systems (CRM) that records customers preferences and demands for a better future usage, explain Buhalis and Costa (2006). Buhalis and Costa (2006) explains that Information Communication Technology (ICT) has been transforming tourism globally by empowering consumers to identify, customize and purchase tourism products and providing the data and tools needed to develop, manage and distribute the services worldwide. The proliferation of the internet, intranet and extranet systems, supports information to be communicated between employees, units, organizations, intermediaries and customers, explain Buhalis and Costa (2006). All this is possible thanks for the advances in ICT and Information Systems (IS). For the tourism sector, the advances in the exchange of information has profound implications, as it reflects the digitalization of all the processes within the travel and tourism value chain. Strategically, “tourism organizations need to use ICTs to develop strategies that are customer centric, profitability driven, and partnership enabled” (Buhalis and Costa, 2006). The figure below shows the consumer path to tourism providers and interconnectivity within the tourism industry. It is an interconnected information system that looks complex, but without this connectivity it would not be possible to provide a tailored customer centric service for the modern tourist. According to Buhalis and Costa (2006), this global value system has been transformed over the years by Information communication technologies where the access to information is achieved more efficiently and effectively and the interaction between all the parts – management and consumers – provides great opportunities. The internet plays a vital role on the re-engineering of the entire value chain to deliver quality and personalized tourism products and create a more engaging and interactive relationship between partners to design those great products and services, maximizing the value provided to each individual consumer. References
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