Adoption of information technology policies in the tourism sector in the era of WEB2.0

Abstract

In this work we look at the impact of information technologies in tourism SMEs and how they can benefit from the exploitation of information technology in their operations without violating privacy, with a special focus in hotel sector. We discuss how current technologies have shaped the new era of tourism and we discuss the travel 2.0 challenges, the transformation that the Web 2.0 and social networking brought to tourism sector, their applications to the domains such as the wikitravel, travel blogs, social networking communities, as well as the underlying technologies for these applications. More specifically, we discuss how the use of internet has transformed the hotel sector and we highlight the importance of the adoption of user friendly policies for the protection of user data. Finally, we propose a model for the protection of privacy that tourism companies need to consider when adopting these technologies in order to comply with the legislation and adopt user friendly trust policies. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.