Opportunities, emerging features, and trends in electronic distribution in tourism

Information and Communication Technologies ICT and Tourism development are interlinked. ICT provide the tools and promote tourism demand and supply, by facilitating the existence and development of tourism and in resolving the needs inherent to the tourism activity. Consequently, tourism increases ICT requirements, since technological developments facilitate the tasks of economic agents in this sector. ICT enables the tourism industry to become more flexible, because it allows for faster and more efficient responses to requests from customers, while reducing operating costs and enabling more competitive prices. In this article it is presented an overview over the opportunities, emerging features and trends that ICT brings from electronic distribution in tourism, this can help and support the decisions of the various actors in the value chain of this business as well as researchers in the tourism field. Namely, it focus on the opportunities granted to tourism distribution by electronic means, the particularities of electronic tourism and the description of the technologies and trends that the tourism organizations have to consider in order to ensure competitiveness. Finally, it is presented a study using 18 Western European countries showing empirically the importance of the ICT to the tourism activity, by focusing how the number of internet users positively affects tourism demand in those countries.