ognizant Communication Corporation

Information Technology & Tourism, Vol. 7, pp. 147-156
1098-3058/05 $20.00 + .00
Copyright © 2005 Cognizant Comm. Corp.
Printed in the USA. All rights reserved.

¹Department of Recreation, Park & Tourism Sciences, Texas A&M University, USA
²Department of Geography, Texas State University, USA

This was an exploratory study about people's online experience while visiting a tourism website. The focus of this study was to examine how flow experience is related to the effectiveness of the website to stimulate visitors' interest in visiting the destination presented. A flow model was proposed. The study revealed that time distortion and enjoyment are two indicators of flow experience. Flow experience is closely related to users' acceptance of information in learning about a tourism destination. It can also lead to changes of attitude and behavior, including inquiring for more information, coming back to the website, and visiting the destination.

Key words: Tourism destination; Web site; Flow; Online experience; Changes of attitudes and behavior; Learning; Structure equation modeling

Address correspondence to Yongxia X. Skadberg, Department of Recreation, Park & Tourism Sciences, 2261 TAMU, College Station, TX 77843-2261, USA. Tel: 979-845-5419; Fax: 979-845-0871; E-mail: vskadberg@ag.tamu.edu

Centre for Hospitality and Tourism Research (CTHR), Victoria University, Melbourne, Victoria, 8001, Australia

This article reports on research that examined Internet adoption by Australian wineries and identified an emergent tourism focus of winery websites. The Australian wine industry has been a recent global success story and winery operators appear to have adopted the website as part of an integral strategy based on direct marketing and wine tourism. The study did not engage a laboratory-based website evaluation, but captured perceptions of winery owners and how they viewed the benefits and features of their sites. Various tourism features identified as being important by winery owners related to information about winery products, viticulture, and regional location. An important finding was the identification of competitor-to-competitor hypertext links on a notable number of winery sites--features that endeavored to promote multiwinery cellar door tourism. The study is significant in that it is one of the few academic works dealing with the relatively new and emerging global industry associated with wine tourism.

Key words: Australia; Wine tourism; Website; Clusters; Direct marketing

Address correspondence to Carmine Sellitto, Centre for Hospitality and Tourism Research (CTHR), School of Information Systems, Victoria University, PO Box 14428 MCMC, Melbourne, Victoria, 8001, Australia. E-mail: carmine.sellitto@vu.edu.au

School of Management, Asian Institute of Technology, Pathumthani 12120, Thailand

The use of the Internet for communicating and transacting with customers has been growing rapidly in the worldwide tourism industry. However, there is a large variation in the intensity of use of e-commerce in the travel and tourism industry. While the Internet usage varies across countries, even within a country there are large variations among enterprises. These variations are mainly due to the impact of several factors associated with the internal and external environment of the enterprise. This study attempts to explore the impact of various factors on the Internet usage rate. The factors are classified into three broad groups: factors associated with the location of the enterprise, internal factors of the enterprise, and technological factors. An empirical study conducted with 95 hotels in seven locations in Thailand is used to assess the impact of the factors.

Key words: E-Commerce usage; ICT and tourism; Locational factors; Organizational factors; Hotel industry; Thailand

Address correspondence to Nazrul Islam, Acting Dean, School of Management, Asian Institute of Technology, PO Box No.4, Klaung Luang, Pathumthani 12120, Thailand. Tel: +(66-2) 524-5663; Fax: +(66-2) 524-5667; E-mail: nazrul@ait.ac.th

¹Institute of Computer Science, FORTH, Greece
²Department of Computer Science, University of Crete, Greece
³Department of Informatics, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece

The tourism industry is a good candidate for taking up Semantic Web technology. We studied the brokering and matchmaking problem in the tourism domain: that is, how a requester's requirements and preferences can be matched against a set of offerings collected by a broker. The proposed solution uses the Semantic Web standard of Resource Description Framework (RDF) to represent the offerings, and a deductive logical language for expressing the requirements and preferences. We motivate and explain the approach we propose, and report on a prototypical implementation exhibiting the described functionality in a multiagent environment.

Key words: Brokering; Rules; Ontologies; RDF Schema

Address correspondence to Grigoris Antoniou, Institute of Computer Science, FORTH, Greece. E-mail: antoniou@ics.forth.gr

¹eCommerce and Tourism Research Laboratory-eCTRL, ITC-Irst, Trento, Italy
²E-Commerce Competence Center-EC3, Vienna, Austria
³eTourism Competence Center Austria-ECCA, Innsbruck, Austria
⁴Department of Information Systems and e-tourism, University of Innsbruck, Austria

A main obstacle to e-commerce is the well-known "interoperability problem." Different players have different views of the world, even in the same application field. This is particularly true in the travel and tourism e-market where IT has been applied for a long time, leading to a plethora of different information systems, each with its own data model and structure. In this article we describe the approach followed in "HARMO-TEN," a European project aimed at solve the data heterogeneity problem by setting up a "virtual interoperable network" and providing the participants with a technological infrastructure based on a shared ontology. This will allow exchanging information in a seamless way while keeping existing data models unchanged.

Key words: Data integration; Interoperability; Ontologies; Mediators; Semantic middleware

Address correspondence to Mirella Dell'Erba, eCommerce and Tourism Research Laboratory-eCTRL, ITC-Irst, Trento, Italy. E-mail: dellerba@itc.it

¹Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell'Informazione, Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia, Italy
²IEIIT-CNR Istituto di Elettronica e di Ingegneria dell'Informazione e delle Telecomunicazioni–Bologna, Italy

The tourism industry is a good candidate for taking up Semantic Web technology. In fact, there are many portals and websites belonging to the tourism domain that promote tourist products (places to visit, food to eat, museums, etc.) and tourist services (hotels, events, etc.), published by several operators (tourist promoter associations, public agencies, etc.). This article presents how the MOMIS system may be used for building a tourism information provider by exploiting the tourism information that is available in Internet websites. MOMIS (Mediator envirOnment for Multiple Information Sources) is a mediator framework that performs information extraction and integration from heterogeneous distributed data sources and includes query management facilities to transparently support queries posed to the integrated data sources.

Key words: Ontologies; Integration; Mediator-based systems; Intelligent integration of information

Address correspondence to Sonia Bergamaschi, Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell'Informazione, Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia, Via Vignolese 905, 41100 Modena, Italy. E-mail: bergamaschi.sonia@unimo.it