TIM and SAM: Use of Technology to Create New Business Relationships for Tourism

By and large business travellers and buyers of package tours are well served by highly competitive services and are the focus of much marketing activity. Airlines and hotels compete for the custom of the business traveller which is placed with specialist traveller agents. Loyalty programs and special promotions abound.. Similarly package tour operators provide and strongly market either direct or through travel agents a wide variety of products at very keen prices. Their marketing is reinforced by the advertising and promotion of the destination Tourist Boards (TB) which extol the culture, beauty and versatility of regions and nations. The third market the individual traveller is, however, less well served. Of course a travel agent will sell tickets, fortrains and planes, and TBs will provide information about regions, attractions, accommodation and activities; but normally very little can be prebooked. The need to search for somewhere to stay and for things to do is, for many people, part of the attraction of individual travel and a reason for rejecting package tours, but it lacks appeal for many people who wish to stay in smaller hotels and guest houses and to visit areas which are not part of the mass tourism culture which develops in the wake of the package tour. The difficulty of finding reliable and timely information, as a direct input to practical holiday planning, has, therefore, limited the scope of the market for individual or customised tours, particularly in areas which are outside the scope of the confident and prosperous (Provence has no difficulty in attracting holiday makers who book and organise their own holidays) or that of the adventurous (young backpackers will always find their own way). lndividualised travel is, however, an enormous market [I] which is growing rapidly. As air travel gets cheaper, as new tourism markets open and expand (e.g. SEE Asia, Eastern Europe, South Africa) and as people get more experience of and more confident in travel, they demand a more varied, more flexible type of holiday, away from the kind of people they meet at home. Travel agents are, however, usually not well placed to meet this demand their margins are so low (as a result of fierce competition in the airline and package tour businesses) that they cannot afford, to employ staff who can provide authoritative advice on routes and destinations; and they have no means of trading with and placing bookings with small and remote organisations. They miss an important part of the existing business, whose size is itself limited by the lack of a retail industry. Meanwhile, hotel and resort owners and the TBs that represent them see their business~controlled and limited by the activities of tour operators whose buying power sets commercial terms and who funnel dis~ro~ortionate amounts of tourist traffic tda limited number of locations. Many of these organisations have a vested interest in a more even utilisation of tourism assets in a region or country and in attracting the business of the more up-market, less disruptive and higher spending individual traveller. But how, do they reach them and get them to pre-' book large parts of their itinerhry?'