Last session in Tourism Business Applications we spoke basically about two types of travelers:
·The business traveler
·The leisure traveler
The main differences between those two regarding the hotel decision is that business travelers often do not made “travel decisions” by themselves but their offices do it.
On average business travelers are better educated and can handle computers better.
Leisure travelers needed more time to use the Internet for independent traveling, but nowadays in North America and Europe the “independent leisure travel” dominates as a cause of the arousal of the increasing Internet use.
People use the Internet for Travel Planning issues;
They want to
·Get information about destinations
·Search for accommodiations
Interesting points:
·Half of online travel planners are baby boomers, who take on average 10 leisure trips a year
·Still WOM is influencing online travel planners
I think that both leisure and business travelers are aware of the increasing importance of the internet. They don’t only want to find the cheapest offers, they also looking for the best suitable offer for them.
Summary of the article “Does it Matter?” by Nicholas Carr
This article is about the increasing importance of It technology and not.
What do I mean by that?
The author Nicholas Carr began the article with numbers of increasing spending of companies in IT after the introduction of the personal computer
1965 5%
1980s 15%
1990s 30%
2000s 50%
I have to ad at this point that 50% and even 30% of a companies’ capital expenditure is a bit high, organizations have lot of costs like wages, electricity, maintenance… that is why I think that some information is missing here.
However Mr. Carr formulated an assumption:
“IT’s potency and ubiquity have increased, so too has its strategic value”
BUT fact is that availability of information technologies increased and their costs decreased, which means nowadays computers, internet and so on is for more companies available since its cheaper.
Starting from this point the author began to question, if IT technologies are really such an advantage as we think they are; he showed us by drawing a parallel that there are similarities between the expansion of the IT and the “rollouts of earlier technologies”.
Explicitly he described the rise of railroads and electricity and the increased demand as far as those technologies became part of the “general business infrastructure”
Then Mr. Carr tried to underpin the effect if technologies are available to everyone;
“opportunities for individual advantage are largely gone” after the so-called build out phase of a technology and such completed technologies stop to influence competition, they influence an economy on a macroeconomic level, they became a standard of a country;
“What would Austria be without electricity: economical irrelevant.” by me (notproved !!!)
According to the Moore’s Law the transistors on a computer chip double every two years; or in other words; speed and memory capacity doubles.
AHS =Analytic Systems Automated Purchasing introduced in the 1976, a system that helped hospitals to purchase goods electronically, the heart of this system was a mainframe computer, which helped hospitals to order more efficiently.
After successive implementing this system for other companies, such companies using this system gained a competitive advantage.
Nowadays such systems are cumbersome in view of a competitive advantage;
the personal computer is responsible for that.
But still companies are spending a lot of their revenue in information technologies although the 25 companies , which delivered the highest economic returns spend less in IT than the average does ( 25 best companies; on average 0,8% of revenue on IT, typical company; on average 3,7% of revenue on IT)
Hence organizations maybe rethink the importance of IT.
PDA City Tour, iWalk (Podcast), Mobile applications
As a tourist you have a variety of possibilities exploring Vienna; you can use the old fashioned way of a map or city guide, or you switch to techniques like the iWalk, PDA City Tour or other mobile applications like Photosynth.
All of these new technologies have advantages and disadvantages according to “real” devices like books and we had to find those out in our university course called Tourism and Hospitality Business Applications.
Our professors allocated our class in groups, supported us with devices (the PDA City Tour computer and GPS tracker thing) and told us to make photos that we could use them later for Photosynth.
The bigger picture of our task in the inner city of Vienna was to collect as much primary data as possible with our cameras and GPS devices that we will be able create our own city guide after a few sessions.
Apart from the task to creating photos, we had to try out new technologies like the PDA City Tour or the iWalk.
I think that there is not really a big difference between a travel guide in book form or in a electronic one; either you have to read or to listen.
In other words there is not so much interaction between the devices and the user.
You had to check the numbers on the physical map against with where you are the moment.
Are you near the monument you want to be ?!
Though if you found the right monument ( and I mostly knew them since I am from Vienna) the information provided from the PDA and the iWalk was useful and interestingly packaged.
However in the End it was a great day and we all had a lot of fun,
Last week we spoke in our seminar Tourism Business Applications, we spoke about how to create a google account, a own blog on blogger.com, how do use google docs (what I am doing now firstly) and we also talked about the excursion we will have.
Today I won’t talk about the excursion but about what I experienced with the other issues we discussed during class.
I use google mail, since the beta version 2004 is available on the Internet, to me having access to GMail was a good thing and back in time i also was proud of it I could have my standardized start page google.com and also look for my mail. However therefore I already had an google account.
Google doc is a new experience to me but I since I am using it I am quite satisfied with the program, it really could be a substitute for Microsoft Word.
Def of blogging= writing face book status all the time
Blogging is also something new to me, I always tried to avoid blogging, because I have thought up to now that blogging is for people with no life who wants to share their experience in any field of interest preferably on the Internet instead of talking to friends. Thought I have changed my mind now a bit, blogs can be a useful to exchange information and help others in spheres that they don’t now so well.
I really hope that I will enjoy blogging in the future like writing my face book status.
