The Internet serves as a major marketing and communication tool in the tourism industry; it is, therefore, surprising that there have been few discussions of the structural relationship between tourism and Internet-based advertising. This study focuses on determining how Internet-based advertising has influenced travel agencies operating in the tourism industry. The sample of 605 respondents is...

The fact that information and communication technology (ICT) has a significant impact on industries and single organizations is an already established and well researched issue. Markets are changing – becoming faster, bigger, more standardized as well as segmented, and more competitive. ICT has a considerable impact on nearly all areas of a company’s activities, especially for companies operati...

Commercial shipping cannot readily reduce its dependency on fossil fuels. Ships are large energy consumers and need to carry sufficient fuel for a voyage. The principle of green steaming, when ships travel at slower speeds to arrive just-in-time, is discussed and a methodology developed to estimate the carbon savings resulting if the industry were to adopt this practice. The method is based on ...

Large body of recent work has been devoted to multi-agent systems utilized in e-commerce; in particular, autonomous software agents participating in auctions. In this context we modify a model agent-based e-commerce system so that it can serve as an airline ticket auctioning system. Such a system can be then combined with a Travel Support System that utilizes ontologically demarcated travelcont...

The objective of this paper was to develop a useful framework for estimating demand for tourism in emerging markets. Tourism has become one of the most crucial sectors in a large number of emerging countries. Moreover, the tourism industry in such markets is forecasted to keep increasing in the next decade. Hence, understanding and accurately forecast demand in the industry is essential in orde...

or Just Resting? " This is the title of a recent call for papers for the Journal of IT Theory and Application. The special issue aims to discuss the problems of unfulfilled business forecasts and related stock market plunges. However, despite these problems , online transactions are increasing— at least in some sectors, such as the travel and tourism industry. In fact, tourism is the leading ap...

Cruise tourism generates an estimated $18 billion a year in passenger expenditure and has been the fastest growing sector of the travel industry in the last years. Arrivals in the Caribbean region increased from three million in 1980 to more than 25 million in 2007. In this paper we describe the evolution of the cruise industry and review the experiences of different cruise destinations. We als...

Medical tourism is a term referring to the people traveling to other countries to obtain medical care. Like any other rapid growing indus­try, medical tourism has prompted ethical and legal issues. These issues are mainly pertained to malpractice and consumer protection. Beside these, risk management, foreign hospital liabilities, international ad­vocacy, facility ownership, intellectual proper...

This study builds on previous research on the impact of tourism advertising and argues that there are a number of likely routes through which tourism advertising influences destination choice. Data were obtained from a survey that examined the impact of Illinois travel advertising and was conducted during the fall of 2001. The results confirm that there are strong linkages among top-of-mind awa...

Recent developments in computer reservation systems and associated new trading patterns may bring about important changes to the (West) European travel and tourism industry in general and the tour operator business in particular. The new trading forms are deriving from the establishment of electronic market systems, for example, as a result of the merging of global airline reservation systems w...