Intro

But before we get into the technical stuff, let's have a look at the rational behind this project...

The Tourism Industry is key to the Scottish economy
It generates up to 9% of employment, and is the main source of revenue for around 125,000 businesses. This number includes many different types of businesses of which the most representative ones are the accommodation, transport and visitor attraction sectors.

Information Technology plays a major role in supporting tourism
And the strategic planning of tourism destinations integrates the stakeholders of the industry. Thus the need to adopt a holistic approach for the assessment of eTourism. Some few projects have adopted this approach for assessing IT-readiness in our industry before. But the indicators they use were not designed considering the specific IT needs of the tourism industry. They adopt indicators developed for businesses, in general, and they tend to ignore the applications which really make a difference to our industry.

eTourism capability here refers to the IT solutions in the Tourism Industry
And nobody better than the businesses themselves to tell us which IT systems and applications are relevant to them. This is why part of the research methods will involve the collaboration of tourism businesses.

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