Abstract:
Information and knowledge management have become crucial to the
development of a competitive edge on the market. This requires the gathering of
complete and consistent information in an environment where companies are
working increasingly with a vast network of partners. In this paper, we
investigate the case of platforms on the tourism market selling trips in boxes
thanks to a wide network of partners upstream (service providers) and
downstream (distribution network). A particular case feature here is that the
product is bought to be gifted which increases the complexity of the information
gathering process. The information needs are defined as well as the potential
information gaps. Solutions are discussed in order to reach information
consistency through greater Information System integration: bridging
information gaps appears to be mostly feasible but still leaves one actor in the
shade. Platforms in the tourism market, even though they may get a good degree
of qualitative information, will not achieve perfect information.
Machine summary:
com (march 29th 2010)) (View the image of this page) The tourism platform here, as the creator and promoter of the tourism products, acts on both sides of the market: on one side, it interacts with the retailers and the distribution organizations by whose intermediary it promotes the offer; on the other side, the platform interacts with a network of service providers willing to be included in the offer and with whom contracts are signed to set the price of the service and delivery conditions.
The value created by the tourism platform then proceeds from the quality of the coordination of offer and demand between the two sides of the market in a given period of time during which the box is purchased and then consumed.
Selling process of the boxed tourism product Information Disruptions Related to the Global Process Gathering the needed information will enable the platform to go through operational management as well as new product launching more quickly and in a cheaper way when fully exploiting the database thus created.
The difficulty in such an Information System is due to the fact that there are multiple potential nodes and that the breaking of the information chain at the stage of one particular node is sufficient to make it impossible to trace the box through the whole process and therefore to obtain data consistency.
The numerous actors in the process and potential complexity of the information system Coping With the Information Gaps in the Case of Tourism Platforms We now discuss the effective and possible traceability along all the nodes of the chain.