ICT & Tourism Business Initiative

In the coming decades it is expected that tourism demand will shift from mass tourism to more tailor-made customised tourism for the individual traveller, which is a market segment particularly relevant for the EU SMEs in the Tourism sector.

The Internet has dramatically changed the way in which consumers plan and buy their holidays.
It has also affected how tourism providers design, shape, promote and sell their products and services. The market for tourism relies heavily on information. Since the emergence of the Internet, travel information search and booking has been one of the top five most popular on-line tasks.

Big tourism companies have responded to these new opportunities and developed e-commerce applications and own global reservation and distribution networks which interconnect tourism distributors with tourism suppliers to sell their products and services.

Unfortunately, most tourism SMEs have traditionally avoided the rather costly electronic distribution networks and established their own Internet presence, for advertising and marketing their products and services.

The ICT & Tourism Initiative aims at facilitating SMEs to interconnect via big distribution networks at affordable costs with all relevant market players and thus helping them to participate in the digital value chain.

The inititiative will consist of 3 pillars:

• a policy component
• a technological component
• operational component

The first pillar (policy) will take the form of a High-Level Group (HLG).

The group will bring together high level personalities from the area of tourism as well as from the area of information and communication technologies (ICT) and other relevant stakeholders.

They will analyse market evolution, identify needs and provide recommendations for future policy development.

The HLG will be prepared by a Sherpa expert group

• 1st Sherpa meeting : 27/03/2012 (presentations)

The second pillar (technological) will have a mainly technological character.

It will be based on a demonstration project.

The project aims at facilitating ICT aspects of cooperation between companies located at different sections of the tourism industry's value chain.

Particular attention will be paid to ensure that SMEs can easily participate in the digital value chain without having to bear heavy costs.
This new project will facilitate the entry into the market of new, dynamic players, strengthening business relations between SMEs and big companies which will help SMEs become fully integrated international business partners.

The demonstration project has started in January 2012 and will last for 30 months.

The third pillar (operational) will be in the form of practical support portal.

It will assist businesses (mainly SMEs) in each step of their decision-making and business processes.

It will become the one-stop-shop providing them with all kind of valuable and practical information that could be of interest to a company of the tourism industry in the EU.

The portal will be a B2B instrument and will provide up-to-date ICT-tools for business to any tourism company to help them set up, manage and promote tourism business..
The portal is expected to be delivered towards the end of 2013.

The ICT & Tourism Initiative will facilitate the entry into the market of new dynamic players, strengthening business relations between SMEs and big companies thus helping SMEs become fully integrated international business partners.

Bigger companies will increase their innovation capacity by cooperating with dynamic and innovative SMEs, which will result to enhanced customer satisfaction through more flexible and personalised services.

In that way it will benefit tourism businesses and travellers at the same time.