TIScover A Web-Based Tourist Information System B. PRÖLL†, W. RETSCHITZEGGER‡, R. R. WAGNER† † Research Institute for Applied Knowledge Processing (FAW), University of Linz, Austria ‡ Department of Information Systems (IFS), University of Linz, Austria Email: {bp, rrw}@faw.uni-linz.ac.at,
[email protected] Abstract: The Internet is more and more emerging as some kind of travel agent. This is since, for the tourist industry, it represents a perfect platform to bring products and services to the customer in a direct way. However, Web-based tourist information systems are required not to offer online brochures only, but rather to provide both, value and service. One of the first Web-based tourist information systems which has recognised this fact was TIScover. TIScover is a tourist information and booking system based on Internet and database technology. Some of the main origin concepts of TIScover are outlined in the following. The full version of this paper can be found on the World Wide Web at http://www.faw.uni-linz.ac.at/FAW_WWW/Projects/tiscover/euromednet98.html.
1 Introduction The development of TIScover [TISc98a] has been started in 1996 based on the experiences made with the pioneering system TIS@Web [Burg96]. TIScover serves as a medium to bring tourist information to the tourist in a direct way without using traditional intermediaries. The aim of TIScover is twofold: First, tourists should be supplied with up-to-date and comprehensive tourist information on countries and all tourist products they offer like villages, hotels or other places worth seeing. Second, it aims to attract the tourist to buy certain tourist products and equally important allow the tourist to buy them online. Currently, TIScover manages more than 70.000 Web pages covering information about different kinds of tourist facilities like 750 villages and 15.000 accommodations across Austria. However, TIScover has the potential to be employed not only in Austria but rather in any Mediterranean country. This fact has been proven in that since half a year, TIScover is also employed in Asia, presenting tourist information about Thailand [TISc98b]. Some of TIScover's concepts which are key factors for this success are described in the following. 2 Decentralised Maintenance of the Tourist Information Base The effectiveness of a tourist information system heavily depends on a proper maintenance of the underlying tourist information base. Especially in the context of online booking, the prices and the number of available products have to be correct and up to date [Proe98]. To cope with this requirement, TIScover supports decentralised maintenance of the tourist information base on the basis of a Web-based maintenance module. Each tourist information provider is able to actualise and extend his tourist information base directly, resulting in much less effort for the system provider. Moreover, the huge tourist information base of TIScover, 30.000 tourist products by now, can only be kept up to date in this way. A prerequisite for decentralised maintenance is that tourist information is stored within a database system. The HTML-pages presenting this information to the tourist are automatically pre-generated by the system in order to increase runtime performance. Every time the underlying information changes, affected pages are automatically re-generated. It has to be emphasised that this approach is in contrast to many existing tourist information systems where in case of changes to the tourist information, HTMLcode must be edited manually. 4 Genericity of the System A major goal of TIScover is to provide a system which is general enough to be employed both, for different kinds of tourist information providers and for different countries. At the same time, since especially in the tourist industry, uniqueness is the main attraction, the system has to take into account the individuality of each tourist information provider and country. To achieve these goals, TIScover provides concepts for achieving adaptability while preserving individuality as well as for internationality including multilingualism and foreign currencies.
In TIScover an authorised tourist information provider is able to announce any number of any type of tourist products. The tourist information provider is free in deciding, if he offers only information on his tourist products, e.g., price information on his rooms, or if he wants that the product can be booked online by a tourist. Furthermore, several products of different types can be assembled into a so called package with an individual price including, e.g., an accommodation and some additional service like a skiing ticket. By means of a Web-based Layout Assistant a tourist information provider is able to choose between a lot of different layout templates for each kind of information and product which should be presented. Concerning multilingualism, any language can be supported by TIScover without any additional programming effort but simply by translating all information maintained by TIScover and entering them by using a Web-based Translation Assistant. Considering the currency, if the tourist choose to get price information in a different currency than the default one, not only the mere price information is adapted accordingly, but also the computation of total prices of bookings and the search criteria concerning price limits. The support of foreign currencies goes even further: As soon as TIScover is run in another country, which is already the case with Thailand, the default currency representing the basis of all price calculations can be changed accordingly. 5 Finding and Booking Tourist Products The placement of a tourist product on a huge tourist information server like TIScover requires detailed consideration as the bookable product must not disappear under the masses of pure tourist information. TIScover realises different philosophies how to access tourist information and especially bookable products through the modules Atlas and Scout. The philosophy behind the module Atlas is, that the customer is able to go through tourist information by following a geographical hierarchy ranging from world via continent, state, country and village down to accommodation and room level. Each of the geographical levels offers those tourist information which is important right at this level. For example, one gets information about duty free regulations as well as the highlights of a state at the state level, whereas at the village level, information about skiing facilities is available. In contrast to Atlas, the module Scout fully resigns navigation in that it realises direct access to an available bookable product. This is achieved by allowing the specification of different search criteria, comprising locations, accommodation types and equipment, price limits and date of stay. On the basis of the specified criteria, TIScover generates a list of available rooms, including total prices which now can be booked by the customer. In case of booking, the tourist information provider is notified by an automatically sent fax and email, the tourist is sent a voucher for the purpose of confirmation [Proe98]. 6 Outlook There are a lot of issues relevant in the context of tourist information systems which have not been dealt with in this paper. Some of them, including the questions of online payment and security, interfaces to legacy systems and long transactions, are part of ongoing work. References [Burg96]
F. Burger, P. Kroiß, B. Pröll, R. Richtsfeld, H. Sighart, H. Starck, TIS@WEB - Database Supported Tourist Information on the Web, in Proc. of the International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism (ENTER’96), A Min Tjoa (ed.), Springer, Edinburgh, Scotland, 1996
[Proe98]
B. Pröll, W. Retschitzegger, P. Kroiß, R.R. Wagner, Online Booking On The Net - Problems, Issues and Solutions, in Proc. of the International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism (ENTER’98), Springer, Instanbul, Turkey, 1998
[TISc98a] Homepage of TIScover, http://www.tiscover.com, TIS Innsbruck, FAW Hagenberg, Austria, 1998 [TISc98b] Homepage of TIScoverasia, http://www.tiscoverasia.com, TIS Innsbruck, FAW Hagenberg, Bangkok, 1998
