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This paper presents the results from a study where 3D city maps is used on mobile computers. The aim of this study is to get feedback from the users on how they experience the use of 3D maps as an interface in search for tourist information. To do this an application is developed that use a 3D map for routing and way finding. The application is tested on a group of boat tourists in the harbour of Tønsberg (Norway). The results showed that a rather large group of people found the use of 3D maps valuable both as a navigational tool and as a tool for geographic orientation. In the paper, also some technical issues that enable the transmission of 3D maps in a wireless network and its use on mobile devices, is also discussed. The research is carried out as part of the EU-Project TellMaris (1ST 2000-28249) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information technology in hospitality and tourism education has gained popularity as a research topic since the first few conceptual papers appeared at the end of the last century, particularly focussing on curriculum issues. This paper diverges slightly from the existing research stream and examines how industry specific hospitality information technology can be integrated into a hotel school's IT-infrastructure, creating a live learning environment where systems are not just used in "standalone" training sessions, but also in operations where students can get "real" hands-on experience with the systems themselves as well as how these systems interface. The authors developed a prototype based on the IT-infrastructure that they developed at their own institution, and tested this externally against the practice and opinion of their peers (other schools) and internally with students and colleagues, based on the experience that they had with the system infrastructure during its first year of operation. The results show that the developed prototype is quite advanced compared to other hotel schools, but that challenges still lie in the traditional problem of how to integrate the technology into the curriculum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The tourism industry is dynamically evolving, responding to significant environmental changes. Information Technology (IT) applications constitute a major contributor to the industry's evolution. This paper reviews several popular tourist destination analysis and planning instruments. Specifically, evaluation matrix techniques and simplified diagrams for landscape analysis are covered. It then attempts to develop such an instrument, namely the Tourism Destination Analysis Card, The card belongs to the section elevation diagrams type of simplified diagrams for landscape analysis and its philosophy is based on the presentation of related geographic areas. The data base management system, the architecture of the proposed IT application and the information flow diagram are finally presented analytically. The overall objective of this paper is to introduce a "coordination and communication" scenario among the involved players of the tourism industry (the public sector included) based on technology challenges upon which information flow and transactions will be accelerated and the value of the end consumer enhanced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional electronic commerce models just enable the online offering, ordering, payment, and delivery of goods. One common characteristic of the different models is their isolation. Though they are connected to the Web, they still are isolated islands in the online universe, as they cannot interact with each other without media-breaks. The isolation is enforced by the limited support of coordinating interactions among partners in today's marketplace. This work provides an infrastructure for modeling and coordinating ad-hoc relationships among partners involved in the market for buying and selling goods or services. Support for these relationships, called trading alliances here, is what this paper about. It provides opportunities to bundle complementary needs of partners according to unpredictable requirements to the market. This paper augments existing electronic commerce models by defining an infrastructure for collaborative electronic market. It considers an example of trading among a travel agency and partners. It also describes the underlying technologies for implementing the proposal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Service quality is argued to be a crucial success factor for ASP's, but yet an empirically validated instrument for measuring the service quality of ASP vendors needs to be developed. This paper aimed to fill in this gap. After synthesising previous literature on the service quality construct within the context of IS, e-commerce, ICT outsourcing and ASP effectiveness, the paper proposes a set of dimensions and model for measuring ASP service quality. The model is tested within a set of Greek tourism and hospitality businesses. Directions for future research as well as suggestions for improving the practices of ASP suppliers and users are also provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on New Zealand (NZ) small and medium tourism enterprises (SMTE) and their use and adoption of information and communication technologies (ICT), particularly the Internet. An overview of the research that has been conducted in this area reveals a number of gaps in our understanding of issues facing small operators. We argue that these limitations are due, in part, to an over emphasis on survey based research. The paper then reviews key findings from a qualitative, multi-sectoral, program of research based around over 250 in-depth interviews conducted between 1998 and 2002. The core aim is to provide a deeper understanding of the major factors that hinder or enhance prospects for ICT uptake that have remained largely hidden from the survey based research. The ability of technology to foster improved competitive performance through network and alliance formation is highlighted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Service-driven architectures promise a new paradigm providing an extremely flexible approach for building complex information systems. However, at the current moment, service architectures go little way beyond standardized remote procedure calls and textual directories to locate and describe a service provider based on human intervention. In this paper we consider three important dimensions for building next-generation service-driven systems building on enabling technologies such as Web services, Peer-2-Peer and Semantic Web. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the field of tourism various market research data from guest surveys is available. However, this valuable information cannot be compared as each entity uses different survey designs and therefore obtains heterogeneous data. Hence, extensive data is available but wise use of this data is impossible unless the information is harmonized in a comprehensive database. In this paper a comparable database is suggested that serves as a marketing information system and offers new opportunities for analyzing data from different sources. It discusses various comparability problems and shows how to harmonize heterogeneous data. Final result is a proposal of a quantitative model that integrates guest survey data from several European cities and allows access to a comprehensive database via the Internet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a model supporting intelligent interactions of tourists with other tourists and locals and the tourism information of a particular Destination before, during and after the trip. The approach tries to bridge the "Community Gap" which is the lack of interactions among tourists and between tourists and locals at a particular Destination. Community interactions are very important both for prospective visitors and for Destinations for many reasons including, greater independence and self-planning in the visit's design, exploitation of the local society knowledge about the Destination, as well as promotion of regional policies and collective purchases of services from prospective visitors. Modem information technology has become ubiquitous, supporting visitors with a variety of devices ranging from handy devices, to Community Walls, to paper interfaces, to home PCs. The paper focus is the description of the knowledge bases and their capabilities for intelligent interactions for supporting tourism communities at Destinations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is extensive discussion in the travel industry press about the inevitable disintermediation of travel agents as a result of the widespread availability of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). This study empirically investigates the effect of the evolving business environment on travel agents in New Zealand's largest city, Auckland. Our work is based on in-depth interviews conducted with agents, owners and travel sector experts in the greater Auckland region. We review the current pressures facing travel agents, emphasizing the pivotal role played by ICTs. The research highlights key points for the commercial survival of agents including: niche marketing, the provision of excellent service, marketing and purchasing alliances, and the capacity to keep pace with technological advances. The paper also reveals that the traditional boundaries existent between the principal and the consumer are open to negotiation and 'adding value' in the distribution chain is considered an essential strategy for survival. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the last years a broad spectrum of different Web-based tourism information systems (TIS) has been established. The acceptance and consequently the competitiveness of a TIS is mainly determined by the quantity and quality of data it provides. Most existing TIS already try to fulfil the tourists request for an extensive data collection. Moreover, tourism industry now realised also the potential to increase data quality by providing individual and specialised information about tourism objects. For this, appropriate search as well as presentation features are required. The advantage of individual information presentation is twofold. It increases the quality of information and on the same time it decreases the amount of data presented to the user. In order to cope with these demands, in this paper concepts of learning systems are applied to tourism information systems. Cognitive styles are used to describe the preferred way of information processing of each user (tourist). A rule system covers meta information about the mapping of user profiles in combination with cognitive styles and the corresponding query results of a specific TIS. Information presentation depends on the individual preferences and user skills, thus satisfying the specific expectations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a part of the results of a study undertaken in the Italian Dolomites region, focusing on the role and use of Internet in the different phases of the decision-making process of tourists choosing this destination. Taking place during the summer 2001 and winter 2001- 2002 seasons, the study was conducted by means of 4910 interviews administered through local tourist organisations. The paper will put forth some recommendations for the development of effective activities of destination marketing, both online and offline, for Alpine tourist destinations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Centralising the corporate travel function in organisations with substantial travel expenditure is becoming an established practice worldwide. South African organisations follow this trend. However, corporations in South Africa, in contrast to the findings of studies done in the USA, has shown a minimal adoption of self-booking tools that allow corporate travellers to book their own travel by making direct contact with GDS or supplier inventory systems through corporate intranets accessible via personal computers and personal digital assistants and wireless application protocol. More importantly, it appears that corporations currently do not encourage corporate travellers to use self-booking tools. This research shows that the corporate travel agency is still in a strong position as the preferred distribution channel. Based on secondary research and supported by these results, this paper proposes a conceptual model for successful corporate travel management. This model requires ongoing research in the field as well as testing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an approach to holiday scheduling which schedules the activities a tourist can enjoy in a city through an Internet service available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week (at information desks in airports, train stations, etc.). Holiday scheduling turns out to yield constraint satisfaction problems, with the particularity that the amount of constraints in this problem is not critical, but the number of activities is huge. Hence, the methodology proposed is a combination of case-based reasoning and constraint solving algorithms. The benefits of this combination are particularly useful in scheduling real life problems, and is suitable in terms of the particularities of the domain. A case study at the city of Girona is provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper demonstrates the applicability of tourism portals as an analytical market research too! and a source for highly relevant comparative management information for destination marketing organizations (DMOs). The case example outlined here focuses on the European Cities Tourism Portal, the B2C site developed by European Cities Tourism, a pan-European organization of more than 80 European city tourism organizations currently representing 31 European countries. The use of web content mining and web usage mining tools for the development of inter-regional tourism portals is proposed. Along with a comprehensive description of the conceptual approach, the paper provides detailed information about the technical realization and experiences with the prototype version of the system. Finally it highlights a number of research issues that need further attention in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper investigates enterprises in the Libyan tourism industry and their perception of the role of e-marketing in developing the industry. It considers enterprises that do not apply e-marketing, the problems they face and the benefits they would gain from an e-marketing programme. In relation to this the importance of e-marketing and the extent to which theory is followed is examined. The paper explores what should be done to develop e-marketing for tourist enterprises and how to implement strategic plans for the industry to increase its market share to enable it to compete in the international market place. The tourism industry is important to Libya's economy and greater consideration should be given to its development and, in particular, to e-marketing. This is especially the case for small and medium-sized tourism enterprises (SMTEs) since most industrial sectors depend on these composing 50% privately owned and the rest full or part government owned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information search is a recognised aspect of tourism decision-making process theory. However, there remains relatively little empirical research that demonstrates the complexity of information search in relation to the temporal sequence of decision-making. Further the literature fails to problematise the relationships between age, knowledge acquisition and information needs. This paper discusses these conceptual issues in relation to a small pilot study of 'silver surfers' (older members of society - the so-called 'grey market' - who actively use the Internet). It suggests tentatively that information needed and used is different, not connected to an immediate purchase and proposes further study into this crucial aspect of consumer theory and information use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The vision of nomadic users having seamless, worldwide access to a range of tourist services seems within reach, within only a few years from now. While much of the underlying technology is already available, there are challenges with respect to usability that need intelligent solutions. CRUMPET has realized a personalized, location-aware tourism service, implemented as a multi-agent system with a concept of service mediation and interaction facilitation. The system has been validated in terms of technical and user-perceived qualities at four European trial sites. This paper reports the findings of the user validation and draws conclusions concerning mobile tourism services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Harmonise tackles the interoperability problem in the tourism domain, where organisations following different standards should be enabled to exchange information in a seamless manner. The project puts a strong emphasis on the combination of a social consensus process with the application of new technologies. Carefully analysing and observing the requirements of the tourist domain and its current state of the art, a comprehensive methodology has been elaborated to achieve the desired harmonisation effect. Harmonise combines suitable tools into a platform supporting an ontology-based mediation process. In this paper we describe three fundamentals of the harmonisation effort: interoperability, ontologies and mediators. And we draw a vision of a future electronic tourism market based on these fundamentals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Destination marketing Websites remain largely focused on the communication of functional attributes such as price, distances, and room availability. However, it is argued that a model of embodied cognition, which assumes that consumers derive experiences largely from patterns of sensory input, better reflects the actual construction of tourism experiences in the minds of consumers than these purely cognitive approaches. Acknowledging the importance of senses for human cognition has implications for marketing real world experiences as well as creating experiences online. The paper presents an exploratory analysis that investigates whether information about colors, scents, and sounds expected during vacations in the Midwest United States can be categorized and bundled in meaningful ways, and consequently used in the context of online destination marketing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the effect of Internet-based electronic markets on consumer search in the travel and tourism industry. Two experiments provide the empirical basis for the paper. Which addresses the question of whether consumer search in electronic markets is different form search in conventional markets. In this work we will refine the efficiency of consumer search and its effects with the following specific questions: 'Is consumer search in electronic markets more productive?' and Is consumer search in electronic markets more efficient?' Based on our analyses, we present propositions about major obstacles that have prevented current travel markets from reaching the high efficiency related to the hypothesized electronic markets. Our paper ends with a critical outlook of the market development. Are there ways to overcome some of the observed obstacles and are there indications that the industry has understood the problems and is moving? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents Dietorecs, a novel case-based travel planning recommender system. Dietorecs has been designed by incorporating a human decision model that stresses individual differences in decision styles. Dietorecs supports decision styles by means of an adaptive behavior that is learned exploiting a case base of recommendation sessions that are stored by the systems. Users can enter the system through three main functional doors that fit groups of decision styles, but they can eventually switch the type of support required. The dialogue (questions) is personalized using both the user model (cases) and statistics over the data available in the virtual catalogues provided by two DMOs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Travel and tourism has for many years been on the forefront of communications technology. Entering the next technological era, this paper looks at what interactive television may hold for long-haul travellers as an information source. The tourism possibilities for interactive television are considered in the light of the traveller's experiences with travel, planning, and interactive media such as teletext, the Internet and current interactive television in the United Kingdom (UK). From this discussion, hypotheses are presented that form the focus of a current major study by the authors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information Systems (IS) have evolved and adapted to the advances of hardware and software. However, rather than in technology itself, the innovations have taken place in two fundamental areas; IS analysis, design and development techniques; and changes in the philosophy of IS. Workflow management is a new IS vision than can be classified into the systems that coordinate and control the work of a real time system. Nowadays the information systems are fully implemented in several degrees in the hotel management. In this paper we develope a new workflow modelling technique that can be applied to hotel information systems for process improvement. Hotel information system complexity is related to multiple agents that are involved in its functionality and can develop a great number of coordinated processes. Thus, the applications in this area are fundamental for information system improvement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As buyers become more sophisticated in the use of the Internet when purchasing travel and tourism product, the wealth, breadth and depth of information collected as a result of site visits becomes massive. Therefore, the careful mining of this data becomes crucial to match customers and product offerings. Destination tourism planners must consider how many tourists are desired and which segments to attract and tourism marketers must know actual and potential customers and their needs and wants; determine which target markets to serve and decide on appropriate product offerings, services and marketing strategies. This new media offers the chance to improve the richness and reach of marketing communications with their target segments, particularly through e-mail marketing. The purpose of this paper is to examine how UK destinations collect, analyse and utilise their marketing data from their websites and transform them into meaningful marketing information that can be used in well-targeted direct marketing campaigns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Survey results show that travelers with e-commerce experience are among the early users of mobile Internet services. The members of this segment seem to be relatively willing to share personal information on the Internet. It can be hypothesized that in most case the individual does not experience misuse of this information. In the mobile environment, location based service are now starting to appear. The user of the mobile phone will then be aware of the fact that others will know his/her location. Hence, the question of how users can make privacy decisions in this new mobile environment is important.- In the paper, a prototype of a new service is described. This service or application gives the user the control over to whom information about his or her location is revealed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Virtual Communities are considered an effective mean to achieve good and stable relationships with customers, thus attaining higher levels of economic returns from a website. Italian tourism websites suffer from a general poor capacity in terms of offering good quality contents and services to their visitors. As a consequence, online Italian tourism market is one of the smallest in the world of Internet. This paper analyses the usage of community features by Italian online tourism operators and derives a viable model for a successful implementation of such features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the field of tourism electronic data interchange is of vital interest to almost every tourism enterprise. Small- and medium-sized tourism enterprises are virtually forced to interchange data with other competitors. The approach presented in this paper enables electronic data interchange based on the technologies XML and XSLT. These technologies are recommended by W3C, well supported and free of charge. The presented architecture enable easy configurable, flexible and cost-efficient EDI by transforming data stored within XML documents into a requested data format corresponding to a destination TIS. The transformation specification is defined within XSL style sheets; thus, necessary changes and adaptations do not affect the applications of participating TIS providers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This section highlights the upcoming tenth ENTER Conference of the tourism industry. The conference will continue a tradition of sharing knowledge among researchers in the fields of travel and tourism, and information and communication technologies. The overall conference theme reflects the currency of mobile and location-based services.

Testing user models empirically in a rigorous way does not seem to be a very common and wide-spread activity (Chin, 2001). This study is intended to contribute to this field of research by investigating the effect of adapting the graphical user interface to the user's cognitive style. 176 test persons were assigned to four groups of a 2-by-2 experimental design and inspected the demonstrator of a Web-based travel recommendation system. The basic premise that this type of a user adaptive counseling system is more appreciated by the user than a conventional rigid user interface could be affirmed by this study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rural regions, such as the national and nature parks involved in the ReGeo project, are often dependent on the tourism sector and thus show a high degree of interest in eco-tourism issues. How can such areas attract new visitors, how can they compete with the big players in the tourism industry and how can they make themselves known to a broad public? The following article presents the ReGeo project, which aims to help rural areas find solutions to these issues by working with modem technology. For most rural regions the solution is to set up an attractive Internet site presenting the region, establish a network of local information points and perhaps even provide information on CD-ROMs and for mobile and PDA devices. It has been proven that such tourist information systems are becoming more and more popular and attractive to the user (ProH and Retschizegger, 2000). Such systems can be improved through the use of photographs, maps and animation. ReGeo also uses GIS-functions, a central interactive map and remote sensing data system, which not only improves the attractiveness hut also the usability of an Internet-based tourist information system. It also emphasises the necessity of adapting this system to different devices. The ReGeo-project pays special attention to the specific problems of rural regions, including the lack of a central institution with the ability to administer such a system. Last but not least, ReGeo intends to act not only as a tourist information service, but rather as a multi-purpose digital geo-data service through which the test regions is attractively presented to a broad audience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A versatile middleware for the development of context sensitive Web applications is presented which is supposed to free developers from the great effort of managing several context dimensions such as location and time. The expected benefits are shorter time to market and reduced development costs. The middleware is currently employed in the course of the development of a prototypical campus information system at the University of Klagenfurt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Consumer privacy concerns are threatening to stall the growth of e-commerce. Although regulatory philosophies differ between Europe and the US, there is agreement on certain global principles, namely notice, choice, onward transfer, access, security, integrity and enforcement. A content analysis of the privacy policies of the 30 largest international hotel brands revealed that 25% fully complied with these guidelines, 69% partially complied and only 7% failed to include a policy of any kind. Transgressions most often occurred in terms of Choice, Security and Integrity, indicating an unsophisticated approach to the management of consumer information on the part of the hotel companies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Travel information search is a complex, dynamic and contingent process. Travel information search and planning on the Internet becomes more and more prevalent nowadays along with the development of information technology. However, the usability of the Internet as a travel information source still remains as a problem. This research intends to explore the interaction process between a travel information searcher and the Internet based upon the assumption that travel information searchers search through the tourism information space following their semantic mental models and the mismatch between their semantic mental models and the conceptual model of online conceptual tourism information space contributes to the futile and unsatisfactory travel information search process. An experiment of travel planning on the Internet was conducted and the results confirmed that the overall tourism information space is huge, travelers appear to have a different mind sets as compared with the information on the Internet, and this discrepancy contributed substantially to the usability problem of the Internet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fast development of information communication technologies (ICT) and the expansion of Internet have affected all industries in many countries. Such technologies have been adopted in tourism industry in Europe and America for more than 30 years, and the trend is likely to continue into the future. China, as a fast-growing developing country in Asia, is gaining increasing importance in the international tourism market for its historical and cultural attractiveness as a destination and, more importantly, as a booming tourism source country with its huge population. This study examines how the ICT and Internet have changed the tourism development in China, how important such changes are, and to where such changes will lead China's tourism industry. This exploratory research is conducted based on information collected from airlines, hotels, tour operators, visitor attractions and the tourism authorities within China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The benefits of E-ticketing have created new opportunities for relationship marketing in Asia, in particular in combination with the Chinese concept of Kuan-hsi, to understand the customer better and quicker. This empirical research examines the pre-purchase behaviour of Taiwanese travellers under the first three stages of Hoffman and Bateson decision making model. A total of 206 primary research data were collected inside the waiting lounge of Taiwan's CKS Taipei airport after passing through the pre-boarding security checks. The results showed that although airline passengers are more likely to use the Internet that the general Taiwanese populace, the vast majority (95%) of air tickets were purchased from travel agents. Safety and service were the highest priority for air ticket purchasers, which combined with the cultural relationship norm of Kuan-hsi form barriers to E-ticketing in Taiwan that must be overcome in order for it to be successful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tourists are increasingly using various sources in order to collect tourism information before and during their trip. The upcoming third-generation (3G) mobile services will offer targeted information according to the location that will support travellers' flexible behaviour. This study identifies the travel information needed by travellers using mobile phones and wireless devices (mTravellers) during their visit to a tourism destination. The needs of mTravellers are first extracted through an exploratory survey, followed by a quantitative study to assess the usefulness and the best offering (price and presentation) of the location-based travel and tourism services. Finally, an attempt is made to detect the influence of these services on destination information providers, mainly Destination Management Systems (DMS). It is concluded that the value of mobile travel solutions lies in increasing the offering across the travel activity chain by providing wireless real-time useful information and services, combining tourism products, transportation networks and navigation system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In two previous articles, it was suggested to use the Trip Planning Problem (TPP) to provide decision support with regard to the planning of sightseeing tours. The purpose of the present article is to suggest a few models that are based on the TPP but which relax some of the assumptions made in the TPP. The implementation of these improvements is discussed and a real-life example is given to illustrate what can actually be done with these kinds of models. Going beyond the TPP, by relaxing or eliminating its main assumptions, make it possible to set up a valuable Decision Support System (DSS) for effective computer-assisted customization of sightseeing tours. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In spite of the relative ease of website design, many hotels do not know how to fully utilize their websites as a marketing tool, and many hotel websites have been designed to serve as "electronic brochures" instead of "innovative marketing tools". In view of this deficiency, successful factors for conducting web marketing will clearly help hotels improve their efforts on Internet marketing. This research serves two purposes. First, it makes an attempt to develop a framework for hotel Internet marketing. Second, the research performs a comparison study for Hong Kong luxury hotels and Mainland China luxury hotels using the developed framework. Hotels in Hong Kong are selected for direct comparison with their China counterparts because the former are generally regarded as having an international standard. Lastly, this research makes recommendations for hotels to make better use of their websites as an effective marketing tool. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The airline distribution chain is an excellent example of the impact of ICT and particularly of the Internet on industry structures and interorganisational relations. However, although the opposing effects of ICT on market structure have been summarized and tested into the Electronic Market Hypothesis (EMH), none study has examined yet the impact of Internet advances on EMH's hypotheses. By gathering data from the airline distribution chain, this study tests EMH's validity in the light of e-commerce developments. An enhanced model of EMH is proposed and implications for both researchers and professionals are provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a tradition in tourism literature dealing with the problems and prospects of small and medium-sized enterprises associated with the applications of IT solutions. This article focuses on the special case of small islands in the Mediterranean, addressing the peculiar problems of seclusion and isolation. An empirical inquiry among the tourist entrepreneurs of the Isle of Elba deals with the respondents' attitude and behavior towards IT- and e-commerce solutions but also cooperation, networking and employee qualification. The results are used to develop a business model that is based on the Internet as a local network platform and capable to manage a small island tourist destination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is widely accepted that technological developments have had a major impact on the travel industry as a whole. However, despite the major opportunities and challenges provided by its exploitation, levels of eTourism developments are not comparable to all regions. The key objective of this research has been to examine the eTourism developments in Greece. Results indicate that the online travel market is at the early stages with great potential for development. However, the low level of cooperation and co-ordination at the destination level makes the prospect of DMS development in Greece quite distant. It is clear though that the competitiveness of Greek Tourism will depend on its ability to integrate eTourism tools at the micro and macro level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]