Extranet-Based Maintenance and Customization of Tourism Information in TIScover Birgit PRÖLL1, Werner RETSCHITZEGGER2, Roland R. WAGNER1 1
Research Institute for Applied Knowledge Processing (FAW) Hauptstraße 99, A-4232 Hagenberg, Austria Tel: +43-7236-3343-770; Fax: +43-7236-3343-782 email: {bproell, rwagner}@faw.uni-linz.ac.at 2 Institute of Applied Computer Science, Department of Information Systems (IFS) Altenbergerstraße 69, A-4040 Linz, University of Linz, Austria Tel: +43-732-2468-883; Fax: +43-732-2468-9511 email:
[email protected] Abstract. The proper design and realization of a Web-based tourism information system is one of the most challenging issues in the tourism area. Among others, two aspects are crucial for the success of such a system: First, the system should be as integrated as possible, i.e., representing a “one-stop” shopping experience by providing a high-quality content in terms of comprehensiveness, accurateness and actuality. Second, the system should be as open as possible, i.e., easily customizable by the tourism information provider to fulfill his requirements without any programming effort. A Web-based tourism information system which has faced these requirements is TIScover. TIScover is currently employed in three different European and Asian countries, covering solely in Austria more than 100.000 Webpages, presenting tourism information and products gathered from more than 3.000 tourism information providers. This paper is dedicated to the concepts and mechanisms used for the maintenance of such a huge tourism information base taking special emphasize on the customization of tourism products.
1. Introduction The tourism industry has reported dramatic changes in its structure over the last few years. Customers tend to more frequent, but shorter travel, last-minute reservations, global advice, service quality, market transparency and customized holiday packages [1]. Web-based tourism information systems represent a strategic response to these changing customer demands and can significantly improve the competitiveness of a destination [2], [3]. One crucial success factor for a tourism information system is that it should be as integrated as possible, i.e., it should represent a “one-stop” shopping experience, providing a high-quality content in terms of comprehensiveness, accurateness and actuality. A Web-based tourism information system which has faced this requirement is TIScover [4]. TIScover disseminates information about destination facilities by means of Internet and database technology. Originally, TIScover was realized to market the facilities of a certain region of Austria, namely Tyrol, only. Meanwhile, four additional Austrian federal states, although partly different in their destination characteristics use TIScover as official tourism information system. Currently, TIScover manages more than 100.000 Web pages covering among others 1.500 villages and 15.000 accommodations, originating from more than 3.000 tourism information providers, ranging from hotels to local tourist offices. However, TIScover has not only the potential to be employed in Austria. This fact has already been
proven more than once: First, since half a year, TIScover is also employed in Asia, presenting tourism information about Thailand [5]. Second, TIScover is used by the German company START Media Plus, a major player in the area of online reservation systems, to present tourism information about Germany [6]. Although these countries are obviously significantly different concerning their destination facilities and the requirements of their tourism information providers, due to the openness of TIScover no programming effort was necessary for the customization of the system. The reminder of this paper is organized as follows. First of all, Section 2 gives a brief overview about the whole TIScover system. Afterwards, Section 3 discusses the approach taken in TIScover for the maintenance of the tourism information base and describes the different categories of tourism information providers, supported by TIScover. Section 4 focuses on TIScover’s customization possibilities from a tourism information provider’s point of view and emphasizes on the customization of tourism products. Finally, Section 5 concludes the paper with a short summary. 2. An Overview of TIScover The functionality provided by TIScover can roughly be categorized into three different components according to the different user groups which are able to work with the system. These components, the public Internet component, the Extranet and the Intranet are all located around the central TIScover database, used for the consistent management of tourism information [7]. Note, that the terms Extranet and Intranet denote the use of Internet technology for the realization of applications intended for different user groups [8]. The TIScover database contains a common schema which currently consists of about 300 database tables. This database schema has been constructed on the basis of a domain data model which incorporates all conceptual entities gathered during the process of requirements definition with numerous tourism information providers and from the experiences with the predecessor system TIS@WEB [9]. To facilitate performant access, Web-pages are automatically generated out of the database in case that the tourism information has changed. For more detailed information about the TIScover database it is referred to [10]. The public Internet component comprises those functionality of the system which is accessible by every tourist all over the world and can be further divided into four modules. First, the module Atlas allows the customer to browse through all kinds of tourism information by following a geographical hierarchy (cf. Figure 1). Second, the module Scout allows for a direct search of every kind of tourism information, like villages, hotels, available rooms, events and camping sites along the geographical hierarchy of the Atlas (cf. Figure 1) as well as online booking of tourism products. Tourism information and products can be found by the tourist in two different ways, either by using a precise structured search on the basis of the common database schema or by using a full text search as it is done by most search engines on the Web. Third, the module Reports is used to provide actual and frequently changing tourism information like snow and avalanche conditions, water temperatures, weather forecast, traffic news and flight schedules. Fourth, the module Trailer represents a tourism magazine, featuring articles and videos about highlights or special events in a certain region. As the term Extranet indicates, the functionality supported by this component is only accessible with proper authorization from all tourism information providers being partners of TIScover. The major functionality of the Extranet is represented by the maintenance and customization module which is described in more detail within the Sections 3 and 4.
Besides that, the tourism information provider is able to access a professional tourism journal called Insider, and information about, e.g., statistics concerning overnight stays as well as access statistics concerning TIScover itself by making use of the Manager. The tourism information provider is also able to get information about the current booking status of his products by using the booking reports module [11].
Europe
Continent
Austria
State
German
Asia
Extensibility
Thailand
Country
Town/Village Accommodation Product Legend: ... Region Manager ... Town/Village (Association) Manager
... Accommodation (Association) Manager ... Tour Operator
Figure 1. Geographical Hierarchy Supported by TIScover
Finally, the Intranet component of TIScover is accessible at the system provider’s side only. With this, the whole system can be configured in various ways, e.g., by extending the geographical hierarchy, defining expiration dates for reports, specifying the default language for Intranet, Extranet and public Internet and constructing layout templates for the individual presentation of tourism information and products. 3. Maintenance and Customization of the Tourism Information Base The effectiveness of a tourism information system heavily depends on the quality of its content in terms of comprehensiveness, accurateness and actuality and its openness to the requirements of different categories of tourism information providers. The dynamic nature of some tourism information meaning that, e.g., rates, schedules, events, opening hours and weather forecasts change with the days, weeks, months and seasons as well as the heterogeneous demands of different tourism information providers possibly located in different countries makes this a challenging task [12], [13]. This section describes the approach used in TIScover to effectively maintain and customize a huge tourism information base. 3.1 The Decentralized Approach of TIScover Basically, TIScover follows a decentralized maintenance and customization approach on the basis of an Extranet. Each tourism information provider, no matter of being a small guest house or a large local tourist office, is able to actualize, extend and customize his tourism
information and products directly, 24 hours a day. This obviously leads to both, much less overhead for the system provider and higher quality of tourism information because of its actuality. The scalability of this decentralized approach is high since, a new tourism information provider can be incorporated by simply establishing the proper authorization. All other issues including concurrency control and consistency management come for free because of the underlying database system. Figure 2 illustrates the process of decentralized maintenance and customization. Whenever a tourism information provider requests to maintain or customize tourism information or products he has registered (cf. ➀ in Figure 2), an appropriate form is provided by the Extranet (cf. ➁). While the tourism information provider is filling out the form, various syntactical checks are performed on the client’s side in order to ensure the validity of the entered data. Tourism Information Provider
➀ Request to Maintain or Customize Tourism Information or Products ➂ Return Completed Form
➁ Provide Appropriate Form Extranet
Public Internet Web-Pages
TIScover WWW-Server
➄ Generate Web-Pages
➃ Update Database TIScover TIScover TIScover Database Database Database
Figure 2. The Process of Maintenance and Customization
As soon as the form has been completed and returned to the system (cf. ➂), TIScover updates the database (cf. ➃) and generates new Web-pages according to the changes made by the tourism information provider (cf. ➄). For more detailed information about this process of generating Web-pages it is referred to [10], [14]. 3.2 Supported Categories of Tourism Information Providers The maintenance and customization of the tourism information base can be done by six different categories of tourism information providers. Figure 3 briefly outlines some of the types of tourism information and products the different categories are able to manage. Categories of Tourism Information Providers
Responsible for ...
Region Manager
general information on an arbitrary number of continents/ states/countries, customs regulations, highlights, tips and news
Town/Village Manager
general information on a town/village, infrastructural and recreational facilities, accommodations (as far as not already managed by another tourism information provider)
Accommodation Association Manager
the same kind of information as the town/village manager but for an arbitrary number of towns/villages general information on a accommodation, various products such as rooms, apartments and holiday packages the same kind of information as the accommodation manager but for an arbitrary number of accommodation
Tour Operator
holiday packages
Town/Village Association Manager Accommodation Manager
Figure 3. Categories of Tourism Information Providers in TIScover
Each of these providers is allowed to use the Extranet to maintain and customize those tourism information and products, he has registered. The assignment of all these user categories to the geographical hierarchy as supported by TIScover is illustrated in Figure 1. Although, as mentioned in the previous section, there are numerous benefits if each tourism information provider also maintains and customizes his content, in reality, there often exist some organizational barriers, such as the lack of an Internet connection or unreadiness of computer novices to engage with the system which prevent such a solution. In this case, TIScover allows that the tourism information and products of such tourism information providers can be managed by someone else, being either another registered TIScover tourism information provider or an authorized TIScover advisor at the system provider’s side. It can be seen that, TIScover does not rigidly force a fully decentralized maintenance approach but rather takes into account the realities of today’s tourism infrastructure while being open for the new millennium, where Internet connections well be ubiquitous. 4. Customization Possibilities on the Tourism Provider’s Side Besides the pure maintenance of the tourism information base, TIScover also allows the tourism information provider to customize the tourism information and products offered in various ways. In this section, two exemplary customization possibilities are described in more detail, namely the specification of different levels of product complexity with special emphasize on the issue of pre-defined holiday packages and the concepts offered for achieving an individual layout. 4.1 Levels of Product Complexity In TIScover an authorized tourism information provider is allowed to announce any number of any type of tourism information and products which correspond to his user category. Furthermore, in this context, the tourism information provider is able to decide about the complexity of the presented product. As The continuum of complexity comprises four levels, ranging from pure information to dynamic holiday packages. (1) Pure Tourism Information: At the lowest level of complexity, pure information about destination facilities is presented. (2) Simple Products: At the second level, a destination facility can be made bookable, thus representing a tourism product. For making a destination facility bookable, some additional attributes are necessary. The two core attributes which have to be specified for all kinds of bookable products comprise the price of the product and the allotment, meaning the number of times a product can be booked. (3) Pre-Defined Holiday Packages: Besides the modeling of a single product as described above, holiday packages are a more sophisticated type of bookable product supported by TIScover so far. Since they very well demonstrate the customization possibilities at the tourism provider’s side, a detailed discussion thereof is given in the next section. (4) Dynamic Holiday Packages, i.e., the arbitrary combination of different tourism products through the customer by means of a product basket, is supported by TIScover only to a first degree. The tourist is able to book a room and choose some additional service offered by the hotelier like a sauna.
4.2 Pre-Defined Holiday Packages A holiday package is defined as an accommodation “enriched” by some additional services like a skiing ticket or a visit of a museum thereby making a pure accommodation more attractive to the customer. In more detail, holiday packages are characterized by the following properties: • Accommodation: The accommodation’s type (e.g., a double room) and its category (e.g., a three star hotel) and the type of board has to be defined. • Additional Service: Any type of additional service is offered by simply describing the service(s) in plain text. • Locality: TIScover requires that a holiday package is integrated into the geographical hierarchy. Usually, a holiday package will be associated to a single town or village. However, since TIScover also allows to configure packages offering a round trip, these packages can be associated to all the locations being part of the round trip, with the effect that the package is presented to the tourist at the Web-pages of each of these locations. • Time: By means of the property time, it can be specified that a holiday package is only available during a certain season and starts on defined weekdays only. In addition, a package can be defined to be a unique offer, being bookable for a certain date only. • Duration: The duration of a holiday package can be defined arbitrarily. • Price: TIScover allows that one and the same holiday package can be sold to different conditions for different prices. For example, different types of board or different seasons imply price reductions or increase of price. By means of this approach sophisticated price tables, customized for different groups of customers can be constructed. Figure 4 shows the form provided by the Extranet for defining different conditions for a package.
Figure 4. Form of the Extranet for Defining the Conditions of a Holiday Package
Holiday Packages can be pre-defined by accommodation (association) managers, town/village (association) managers and tour operators. A special characteristic of a tour operator is that he usually does not own an accommodation by himself but rather uses
accommodation allotments he gets from hoteliers for defining a package. For this, he defines so called accommodation pools, each consisting of accommodation allotments of the same type and category, but possibly received from different hoteliers. Each of these pools can be associated with different kinds of packages. Consequently, the accommodation property within a package offered by a tour operator does not contain a specific hotel, but only a certain room type and hotel category. At the time when a customer books a certain package, a definite accommodation is allocated and the number of accommodations available within the pool is reduced accordingly. Analogous to simple products, a holiday package can be retrieved by a customer directly using the Scout or by navigating through the hierarchical structure of the Atlas. Searching for a specific package via Scout is usually more effective, since a customer simply specifies his requirements by filling out the properties of a package as shown in Figure 5.
Figure 5. Form of the Public Internet for Specifying Desired Package Properties
As soon as the system returns a list of matching holiday packages, the customer can get general information on each package as well as detailed price information and can directly enter the booking module. 4.3 Individuality of Presentation Besides customization of the product complexity, the tourism information provider has various possibilities to individually represent his tourism information and products in TIScover. First, the tourism information provider can select a desired background color and arbitrary background images for each page. Second, the tourism information provider is able to choose between different layout templates constructed by the system provider for each kind of tourism information and product which should be presented. This is possible although the database-based approach of TIScover would entail equally designed Webpages for each kind of tourism product [14]. Third, TIScover makes use of the potential of the Web by allowing various types of multimedia representations for tourism information and products which is especially important to make them more tangible. Thereby a tourism information provider is free to use, e.g., a picture, an animated GIF or even to employ virtual reality to represent, e.g., a room or an apartment. Finally, in TIScover, as in many other Web-based systems, the menu entries within the menu bar on the left navigation frame are dependent on the type of tourism information or product which is currently presented within the form. For example, concerning a village, the menu bar includes among others entries for navigating to the homepage, a picture page, a page about the infrastructure and about available accommodations. However, TIScover
allows the tourism information provider to specify for each type of tourism information and product individual menu entries, linking to arbitrary HTML-pages. The system automatically adds these individual menu entries to the pre-defined ones, already present within the menu bar. The number of menu entries which can be specified individually is configured on the system provider’s side. 5. Conclusions So far, with TIScover, an open system has been developed which allows for the maintenance of high quality content in terms of comprehensiveness, accurateness and actuality, mostly because of its decentralized maintenance approach on the basis of an Extranet and the use of database technology. In addition, a wide range of customization possibilities are supported for the tourism information provider especially considering product complexity and their individual representation. However, there are a lot of further issues which should be dealt with in the future, including an extension of the dynamic packaging mechanism, allowing products to be combined by the customer in an orthogonal way as well as the use of advanced database transaction mechanisms for the booking process of holiday packages [15]. References [1] M. Bloch, Y. Pigneur, T. Steiner, The IT-enabled Extended Enterprise, Applications in the Tourism Industry. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism (ENTER’96), Springer, Innsbruck, Austria, 1996. [2] P.J. Sheldon: Tourism Information Technology. Cab International, Oxon/New York, 1997. [3] D. Buhalis: Information technology as a strategic tool for tourism. Revue de Tourisme, 2, 1996. [4] TIScover: http://www.tiscover.com. TIS Innsbruck, FAW Hagenberg, Austria, 1998. [5] TIScoverasia: http://www.tiscoverasia.com. Go Thailand Tours Ltd. Bangkok, Thailand, 1998. [6] Deutschlandreise: http//www.deutschlandreise.de, START Media Plus GmbH Frankfurt, Germany 1998. [7] B. Pröll, W. Retschitzegger, R.R. Wagner, TIScover - A Tourism Information System Based on Extranet and Intranet Technology, accepted for publication at: Fourth Americas Conference on Information Systems (AIS’98), Baltimore, Maryland, August 14-16, 1998. [8] W. Regli, Intranets: Where the proverbial rubber meets the business road. IEEE Internet Computing, Vol. 1, No. 5, September/October 1997. [9] F. Burger, P. Kroiß, B. Pröll, R. Richtsfeld, H. Sighart, H. Starck, TIS@WEB - Database Supported Tourist Information on the Web. In: A Min Tjoa (ed.), Proceedings of the International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism (ENTER’97), Springer, Edinburgh, Scotland, 1997. [10] B. Pröll, W. Retschitzegger, R.R. Wagner, A. Ebner, Beyond Traditional Tourism Information Systems TIScover, accepted for publication for the Journal of Information Technology in Tourism, 1998. [11] Richtsfeld R.: Benutzerstatistiken im World Wide Web, diploma thesis, FAW, University Linz, 1997, in German. [12] B. Pröll, P. Kroiss, W. Retschitzegger, R.R. Wagner, Online Booking on the Net - Problems, Issues and Solutions. In: D. Buhalis et al. (eds.), Proceedings of the International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism (ENTER’98), Springer, Istanbul, Turkey, 1998. [13] B. Pröll, W. Retschitzegger, R.R. Wagner, TIScover - A Web-based Tourist Information System. In: Proceedings of the EURO-MED NET’98 Conference, Nicosia, Cyprus, pp. 93-94, March 1998. [14] H. Sighart, Templatebasierte Seitengenerierung im World Wide Web, diploma thesis, FAW, University Linz, 1997, in German. [15] G. Kappel, S. Rausch-Schott, W. Retschitzegger, M. Sakkinen, A Transaction Model For Handling Composite Events. In: Proceedings of the Third International Workshop of the Moscow ACM SIGMOD Chapter on Advances in Databases and Information Systems (ADBIS’96), Moscow, Sept. 1996.
