Holiday Packages on the Web

The tourism industry has reported dramatic changes in its structure over the last few years, not least due to the emerge of the Internet. Among others, tourists want to find products which are tailored to their personal needs in a minimum of time, without having to navigate through all the products offered by the tourism information system. Thus, from the tourism information supplier ́s point of view, one major requirement for effective tourism information systems is to support both, the production and distribution of individually tailored holiday packages. This paper focuses on the holiday package facility as realized in TIScover [TISc98a], the largest Austrian Webbased tourism information system. In TIScover, holiday packages can not only be assembled and maintained directly by tourism information suppliers but also easily retrieved, further customized and finally booked online by the tourist.