Benefits of Information Technology in the Tourism Industry

Questions:

1) Does business need IT?

2) Why ConclusionIT is important for business survival?

3) What is required to apply IT into business? (Cost, planning, designing, equipment, installation, training, etc…).

4) How does business use IT? (internally such as staff, employees, and externally such as customers, suppliers).

5) What benefits and advantages does IT bring to business? (Revenue, flexibility, reduces cost, etc….).

6) What type of risk does IT bring to business? (security, privacy, confidentiality).

7) How can business maintain and monitor IT?
 

https://www.australia.com/en-in is an Official Australian tourism website that helps tourists or visitors who like to visit Australia for various purposes such as for vacations, business purposes, entertainment etc. The site helps tourist to make plan for their trip. Tourist can make a rough estimate of the charges incurred for visiting Australia. It is the best website to help tourists to give information about the best places to visit in Australia. It also tells about the latest offers provided by various travel agencies. Even a customer may plan his/her trip by contacting various travel agents and companies the website provide. Contact numbers or emails of the travel agencies are being provided by this website. The site also displays the recent events going on in Australia and all the events about to occur. The site explains about the various seasons of Australia so beautifully. So, this website almost covers all the information that a customer seeks to search while planning trip.  Therefore, the analysis has been done how information technology is helping tourism industry to grow so widely. Analysis covers the benefits industry gets by using information technology and also the risks associated with them. 

Information Technology is the process which contains processing, storage, acquisition, and dissemination of the pictorial, textual, vocal or numerical information by electronics based combination of computing and telecommunications. It is an area that manages the technology and spread over variety of fields such as food, business, media, tourism, shipping, etc.

Information Technology has affected tourism to a great extent. Tourism is an industry that is just not one of the large industry but also it is incremental i.e. it is a growing industry. Information Technology is reducing so many efforts by providing so many benefits to the tourism industry. Information Technology is important for tourism industry because of the following reasons: 

• Geographical information (Jadhav and Mundhe, 2011) is provided by various software and applications related to climate, landscape and location so that tourist may know about the place he/she is going to visit.
• Tourist needs to know about information related to place such as tourist places of his/her interests, the best place in a city, best food courts, best places to stay etc. which is provided by the tourist industry.
• Information such as mode of transport, road maps, train routes, air routes are also needed by tourists which is provided by tourist industries.
• Fare charges for a particular place or city is provided by every tourism industry.
• Recommendation must be given by tourism industry whether it is the right season to visit the place or not. 

Introduction of Information Technology in Tourism is changing its dimensions and providing the tourism industries an exponential growth. There are number of benefits which are provided by Information Technology and are describes as follows: 

• Earlier in tourism industry, computer systems were just used to provide the internal functions of operators in transportation, accommodation and travel sectors. Managements such as Central Reservation systems and Global Distribution Systems were just used by airlines or hotels for enabling travel agencies for reservation or pricing information. But now, they are being used by tourism industries too.
• Tourism industry is making use of Internet in a very effective manner such that online reservation can be done easily. A person does not need to visit any place for booking purpose. For e.g., if a person is new in some city, he or she might not know about the hotels in the city and not even familiar with the routes. So, the facilities such as online reservation help him/her in many ways that as soon as he/she arrives in the city, any cab or taxi is provided by the travel agency so that they could reach to their destination. It has been surveyed that almost 1500 tickets are booked every minute on IRCTC.
• Information technology helps in making interaction between a customer and travel agency strong by providing customer support service via email, call service or online chat services. A customer needs not to worry in case he/she might have some query regarding travelling. They can just contact customer support services for asking their doubt.
• Payment can be done easily via various payment gateways. Customer needs not to visit any bank or hotels to make payment. Customer can pay via net banking or their credit/ debit cards.
• Many tourism companies and travel agencies are also providing mobile applications to the users so that they should not just rely on the laptops or PCs and could easily perform various functions by sitting anywhere at any time 

• Software: Software is an important component when we talk about the Information Technology because it is a set of programs which provides the basic functionalities. Software which is either web based, mobile based or desktop based may be required for tourism industry. So, software is a basic requirement to access the needs for tourism.
• Hardware: Hardware may be required by the tourism companies and customers for performing actions such as for booking, and approving the booking in order to access the software. Hardware might be a laptop, personal computer or a mobile device.
• Data Storage: Some kind of storage will be required by tourism companies to store the queries, data or information related to customers. So, many servers or memory storage devices will be used by company for storing all the details.
• Internet: Internet is an important component of Information Technology as it is the main source to provide access to the tourism industry for the various purposes. 

There are various persons or players which are involved in Tourism Industry in various ways. Some of the people who make use of Information Technology and are involved with tourism industry are as follows: 

• Travel Agent: Travel Agent (Pease and Rowe, 2014)belongs to a travel agency through which customer books his/her trip and agent is responsible to answering all the queries of customer related to the trip and also responsible for booking his/her trip. 

• Government bodies: Government bodies (Pease and Rowe, 2014)also play an important role in Tourism industry. For e.g. if a person has to travel to a different country, he/she must have VISA to travel to that country. Government bodies are responsible for approving their VISA and all formalities. 

• Hotel agent: Hotel agent belongs to a particular hotel where customer wants to stay. He is responsible to provide information such as availability of rooms and facilities to the travel agent so that travel agent could provide this information to the customer. 

• Transport Agent: Transport agent is a person who provides the facility of transport. He is responsible for providing information related to the mode of transport to the travel agency so that they could arrange transport for their customer or tourist. 

• Customer: Last but not the least, Customer is an important person involved with tourism industry. Tourism industry has to take care of this person so that his/her needs be fulfilled and he/she feels satisfied with services provided by the tourism industry. 

• Sometimes, information technology in tourism does not seem to be (Haque and Rahman, 2012)well organized because there is some lack of technical or financial resources. So, it should be kept in mind that organization should be well and up to the point.
• There are some fraudulent companies who make their websites to attract the customer and steal the money and confidential information from customers by offering attractive offers. So, a customer should check about the company before doing any type of booking on a particular website.
• Profitability has not been (Haque and Rahman, 2012)guaranteed by information technology. Sometimes, they are even responsible for worsening the competitive positions of companies and also the attractiveness of an industry.
• Many online travel agencies might not be aware of the resources and functionalities of the internet and might not be able to access necessary web services. So, there is a need to aware the travel companies about it so that they may make use of essential web services.  

There are some techniques through which Information Technology can be monitored and managed which are as follows: 

• Planning and Prevention: Proper planning should be done in advance so that industry makes the best use of Information Technology. There should be specific proactive planning and strategies. Information technologies must store some policies and databases of such relevant information. 

• Feedback and Evaluation: Various communication facilities can be provided by Information technology to take feedback from users or customers so that improvements can be made accordingly. It makes the monitoring easy and efficient. 

• Strategic Implementation: Collaboration, resource management, strategic evaluation, must be done for stakeholders. 

• There should be an automated system monitoring which provides monitoring for 24/7 so that if there are some problems, they can be identified and corrected. 

• Asset Monitoring can be done to monitor the hardware or software assets 24/7. 

• Systems must be protected from any kind of viruses or malwares. Therefore, corresponding antivirus and antimalware must be installed on the system. 

• It is to make sure that wireless network should be secured so that third parties may not be able to access the wireless networks as attackers if attack on wireless networks, they may easily steal sensitive information of customers. 

• Backing up of data must be done time to time so that in case if some disaster occurs, company must be able to access all the information again.

It is recommended that risks and challenges to information technology can be reduced or removed by doing proper planning and implementing the planning strategies. Also, evaluation and feedback helps in reducing the risks. Various types of monitoring such as asset monitoring, backing up of data, protection from viruses, wireless network security and automated system monitoring should be done to reduce the risks to a great extent.  

Conclusion

The report covers the analysis of an Australian official Tourism website which is making use of Information Technology for its business. In this report, the importance of information technology, benefits brought by Information Technology, risks and challenges faced due to Information Technology, how maintenance of technology is done such topics are covered and discussed.  

References 

Australia.com. (n.d.). Visit Australia – Travel & Tour Information – Tourism Australia. 

Pease, W. and Rowe, M. (2014). AN OVERVIEW OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY IN THE TOURISM INDUSTRY.  

Jadhav, V. and Mundhe, D. (2011). Information technology in Tourism. 1st ed.

Academiccreativity.blogspot.in. (2011). Creativity and academics: Impact of information technology in travel and tourism industry.