Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism - Influence, Dynamics, Trends

The ICT influences tourism industry in a growing manner, both in the quantitative and qualitative aspects, with their final individual consumers and group‘s business users, in many dimensions and many non-predictable ways. The ICT penetration into the tourism sector will be supported by novaday‘s development and establishment of new online technologies (e. g. web pages, WAP, mobile phones, PDA, IDTV), the growing ICT interactivity (e. g. hypermedia, interactive maps, GIS applications), growing personalisation (sophisticated information search, presented information structure on the base of user‘s preferences and behaviour etc.), the growing information transmission speed, interconnection among different IS in networks of „classical“ online and mobile online services (e. g. GDS, LBS, CRS, GIS), the growing security of E-business transactions (cryptology, biometry, protocols), and via other factors (e. g. social, economic). What will be dominant, are the different forms of E-business (both B2C and B2B) characterised by growing personalisation, interactivity, complexity and services concentration and at the same time usage simplification. In last years, the dominant role of the web pages/Internet will be transformed into the role of one according to the conditions used technology together with LBS and IDTV, and simultaneously these technologies will cooperate. New age of usage of the ICT in tourism will influence not only sophisticated presentation and online technologies (web, LBS interfaces, IDTV) but also cognitive and AI applications (e. g. semantic representations, knowledge and expert systems), space oriented applications (the GIS), intelligent sorting and information search (which is very important for the exponentially growing information/ virtual space), or virtual reality applications. In the near future will have E-business in developed countries more consumers than in the traditional personal trade. And of course, tourism marketing will change itself more and more into the online form with many competition and business subjects‘ fusion consequences. On the other hand the ICT is an opportunity also for the small businesses (e. g. pensions, small private museums, bed-and-breakfast, specialised restaurants).