The Open Tourism Consortium: Laying the foundations for the future of tourism

The current highly fragmented and multitude of information systems supporting tourism greatly increases the tourist’s search costs. A more cohesive and integrated approach should enhance the tourist’s experience in the three phases of tourism: planning, touring, and reminiscing. The emergence of u-commerce, the ultimate form of commerce, is the backdrop to identifying a series of information products that will improve the searching, management, delivery, and sharing of tourism data. It is proposed that the five products identified (TourDM, TourML, TourStyle, TourCMS, and TourImplement) be developed using the open source model and the cooperative efforts of a large number of geographically dispersed information systems students. The Open Tourism Consortium has been created to support this collaborative endeavor.