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466 TRAVEL ANDTOURISMthe limited opportunity for prepurchase trial in the con-
text of tourism, virtual tours, with their ability to repre-
sent tourism products and services in more realistic and
dynamic ways than other promotional materials, play a
crucial role in offering rich travel information.Travel Decision Support Systems
The term travel decision support systems (TDSS) refers
to information systems designed to simplify the travel-
decision-making process and support consumers in the
various steps involved in planning trips. Trip planning
is a very complex process that consists of a number of
decisions, which often condition each other(Dellaert,
Ettema, & Lindh, 1998; Jeng & Fesenmaier, 2002; Wood-
side & MacDonald, 1994). Also, each decision requires
different kinds of information; thus, separate informa-
tion search activities are necessary. This increases the cost
of the information search process for the consumer and
can often lead to information overload (Good et al., 1999;
Hibbard, 1997). The main function of a TDSS is to iden-
tify and present certain tourism products and services in
accordance with consumer preferences, thus reducing the
number of alternatives that the consumer would have to
evaluate. The functionality of such systems ranges from
more sophisticated search engines and intelligent-agent-
supported information retrieval to true recommendation
systems that enable the consumer to identify destina-
tions or tourism products of interest (Vanhof & Molderez,
1994). The use of a TDSS generally requires specifying
preferences such as desired date of travel and preferred
activities. In their most advanced form, these systems try
to mimic face-to-face human interactions that could oc-
cur between a consumer and a travel agent. In such cases,
the TDSS is typically referred to as a travel counseling sys-
tem (Hruschka & Mazanec, 1990). Current developments
in the TDSS area focus on increasing the ability of such
systems to capture consumer preferences and adapt in-
formation accordingly, as well as to learn from past inter-
actions and support group decision-making (Delgado &
Davidson, 2002; Hwang & Fesenmaier, 2001; Loban, 1997;
Mitsche, 2001; Ricci & Werthner, 2001). Consumers can
take advantage of such systems and benefit from the cus-
tomized information presented to them at various stages
in the trip planning process. However, the currently avail-
able TDSS versions are still more capable of supporting
consumers with a clear understanding of what they de-
sire than helping individuals with only a vague idea of
what they are looking for. It is expected that these systems
will play an increasingly important role in travel planning
as they become more human-centric in design and truly
adaptive with respect to the needs of consumers.E-commerce Applications
E-commerce applications are technologies that support
online transactions between the providers and consumers
of tourism products and services. Online reservation and
payment options were quickly adopted by many suppliers
and consumers and led to the emergence of tourism as
one of the most important e-commerce categories. It can
be argued that the reasons for this rapid adoption of e-
commerce in tourism lie in the particular fit between the
characteristics of tourism products and the capabilitiesof e-commerce applications. The purchase of tourism-
related products and services typically involves the move-
ment of information rather than the physical delivery of
goods and is often concluded through credit card pay-
ments. Also, the complex and strictly hierarchical tourism
distribution system of pre-Internet times led to enormous
information asymmetries and little choice for consumers
in terms of where or how to acquire tourism products.
With the introduction of e-commerce, consumers were
provided with a new means of buying that they were eager
to adopt because it not only offered more choices through
direct links to the many geographically dispersed indus-
try players or new intermediaries such as online travel
agencies, but also catered to consumers by providing new
levels of convenience. E-tickets, for example, are a direct
result of e-commerce initiatives and have tremendously
simplified travel, especially business travel. Current de-
velopments in the area of e-commerce focus primarily
on raising security and privacy standards to ensure safe
and smooth transactions. In addition, efforts are being
undertaken to make a wider range of tourism products
available online. Destination management systems are
becoming more widespread and promise more extensive
e-commerce adoption, thus providing consumers with
greater access to an increasing variety of tourism products
and services.Online Customer Support
Online customer support is a summary term for Inter-
net technologies that allow consumers to contact the sup-
pliers or distributors of tourism products if additional
information or other forms of assistance are needed. Ap-
plications that provide consumers with the means to com-
municate faster and more easily in order to get support
are especially important in the context of tourism. First,
the special nature of tourism products and services (see
Kotler, Bowen, & Makens, 1999, for a detailed description)
makes them more likely to require additional support.
It is very difficult to describe the many experiential as-
pects of tourism accurately; thus consumers often require
further interpretation or more detailed explanations. Also,
tourism products and services are usually purchased or at
least reserved long before they are consumed, and many
things can potentially happen during this extensive pe-
riod of commitment between travel- and tourism-related
businesses and consumers.
Second, geographical and cultural distances between
travel and tourism suppliers and consumers render com-
munication through traditional means very difficult. The
Internet, on the other hand, provides consumers with fast,
easy, and cost-effective ways of contacting the providers of
travel and tourism-related goods and services. Technolo-
gies of support include “Frequently Asked Questions” sec-
tions on Web sites, online request forms, bulletin boards,
Internet phones, e-mail, real-time chat options, and in-
stant messaging applications. These technologies are cur-
rently used in very passive ways, which means consumers
are required to initiate the contact. However, a growing
number of tourism organizations is adopting more proac-
tive approaches to online customer support. They pro-
vide consumers with active assistance either through au-
tomatic e-mail up-dates or by monitoring the behavior