Nowadays European and international travel market has evolved into an integrated environment that needs to address the travellers’ demands for targeted tourism activities…
Nowadays European and international travel market has evolved into an integrated environment that needs to address the travellers’ demands for targeted tourism activities. As a result, an increasing need emerged for the provision of ICT services and tools, to allow easier, cross-border comparison and compilation among different tourism products.
By making the tourism offering more transparent across countries, the selection of the tourism product by the consumer will become easier. Additionally, due to the fact that the tourism market is expected to be more targeted,matching different quality levels will become more important in the future for small and medium enterprises of the Travel & Tourism industry. It is expected that adequate legislation and policies will be defined but it is fair to state that all companies have to take those measures that could positively impact on the quality of the service they provide. Quality is and will be the most important enabler for customer satisfaction and therefore should be dealt with in a proper manner.
In this respect, and focusing on the SME market, EC funded SATINE project (Semantic-based Interoperability Infrastructure for Integrating Web Service Platforms to Peer-to-Peer Networks) aims at developing a secure semantic-based interoperability framework to exploit Web service platforms in conjunction with Peer-to-Peer networks in the tourism industry. By launching tourism as such in a new dimension, SATINE introduces for the first time the notion of Web Services and Semantics in the travel industry, with a specific focus on the facilitation of the tourism product (services) announcement, distribution, retrieval and use. In this context, an interactive network is foreseen, where all tourism stakeholders (tourism and travel service providers, distributors, facilitators and consumers ) participate and transact by providing and using such services.
This network will be based on a peer-to-peer distributed core system, where the components will be based on the Open Source paradigm. Business processes that will be potentially affected by SATINE include bookings and reservations, rentals, travel insurance, loyalty, Internet Booking Engines, as well as, the underlying operations of systems that are currently supporting them.
The current generation of Web Booking Engines use HTML (static or dynamically generated) language for presentation purposes and the HTTP protocol for transmitting the online requests over TCP/IP. This technology enables consumers to make travel bookings through their Web Browser, transparently accessing systems or repositories that contain the adequate travel information. However, any discussion of the Internet as a distribution channel for travel, implies at this moment the use of the existing electronic distribution infrastructure, namely the Global Distribution System (GDS).
Such systems provide to requestors an interface to Travel and Tourism information, but no direct access to the source of that information (airline company/Hotel/car rental enterprise) while SATINE envisages to enable the ‘Travel and Tourism product consumer’ to have direct access to the source. Important in this respect is also the fact that the explosion of Internet and e-Business revealed thousands of small travel enterprises and a large number of new airline companies that are not willing to enter the existing GDS due to the financial implications.
Therefore, the necessity came up to introduce broader and cheaper means to the market, which will enable these enterprises to expand their business through ICT and the Internet, without having to subscribe to any of the current GDSs. SATINE’s semantic Peer-To-Peer network offers exactly this solution, hence operates as a middleware, bridging the offer and demand of Tourism & Travel services within this market segment.
Theodore is the Co-Founder and Managing Editor of TravelDailyNews Media Network; his responsibilities include business development and planning for TravelDailyNews long-term opportunities.
