Tiscover - development and growth.

Abstract

This case study of Tiscover addresses a number of service management areas. It demonstrates how emerging information and communication technology (ICT) solutions facilitate e-commerce in tourism. Tiscover represents innovative service management as it is addressing a number of markets and stakeholders both in the forms of business to consumer (B2C) and business to business (B2B). As an aggregator and retailer of tourism products for the destinations it covers, Tiscover provides a wide range of information and services to the public. As a distributor, it enables tourism suppliers to promote their products directly to the consumer and also to other intermediaries through onward distribution. It also allows destination management organizations to distribute information and augment their service and products thereby influencing consumer choice. Tiscover also supports backward distribution by feeding products in other web portals and therefore it supports B2B service management with its partners that procure and represent tourism products through Tiscover.

Key Issues in Implementing Destination Management Systems

“…DMS are a collection of computerized information about a destination, accessible in an interactive way (Buhalis, Kärcher, & Brown, 2006;Buhalis & Spada, 2000). The concept is defined as a synonym of the technological infrastructure of a DMO (World Tourism Organization, 2001).…”

“…These systems provide the tools that allow information distribution and gather all actors in a network environment. The concept of DMS has attracted considerable attention by numerous researchers as supported by Buhalis & Spada, (2000), Buhalis et al (2006), Buhalis & Egger (2008) and Law et al (2010).…”

“…In the 90s gradually emerged a considerable number of DMS worldwide. Tiscover in Austria and Gulliver in Ireland lead these developments and gradually other destinations including Singapore, Australia, the Netherlands and Jersey followed (Buhalis, et al, 2006).…”

“…These systems were replaced by centralized systems accessed via Web from remote servers located in Application Service Providers (ASP) or internally through intranets (Buhalis & Egger, 2008;World Tourism Organization, 2001). DMS evolved in order to enable e-commerce transactions allowing local businesses to accept reservations through these systems (Buhalis, et al, 2006).…”

“…Two cases can be mentioned: Tiscover and Feratel. The Tiscover system is one of the most successful examples and one of the most referred in literature (Buhalis & Egger, 2008;Buhalis, et al, 2006;Pröll, Retschitzegger, & Wagner, 1998;World Tourism Organization, 2001) The functionality provided by Tiscover can roughly be categorized according to the different user groups which are distinguished by the system into three different components: the public Internet component which interacts with the costumer, the Extranet for touristic information providers and the Intranet for the system provider. All are located around the central Tiscover database (Pröll, et al, 1998).…”