Professional Documents
Culture Documents
try awards for outstanding achievement. The book’s final chapter details the
codes of practice for responsible travel as established by the Tourism Concern
(located in Thailand), so as to assist potential tourists in deciding what to do
and how to act in the destinations they may choose to visit, and assist potential
operators in designing tours to assist local communities.
Mann’s volume is aimed at alternative travel agents and their clients,
especially those tourists with more specific objectives, more funds, and less
time than those who travel either to resorts or as backpackers. The book would
also appeal to marketers in other sections of the industry, and potentially to
tourism planners. It would appeal to some students or academics because of
the initial section dealing with theory, but this would be somewhat limited as
it is very much a practical book. Its greatest weakness is that the prices,
addresses, phone numbers, email and web addresses of products and oper-
ators can be expected to change, and the book will go out of date soon. In
this sense, it is more like other guidebooks, which are reprinted every year
or two. An updated version of The Community Tourism Guide could thus be
forthcoming in the near future. 왎
Paul F. Wilkinson
York University, Canada
The editors argue, in their preface, that information and communication tech-
nologies “increasingly propel the tourism industry and have become one of the
most important determinants of the competitiveness for both the public and
private sectors” (p. iv). Traditional distribution channels (such as travel agents)
face the possibility of being displaced by “virtual enterprises” that create dynamic
interfaces between suppliers and consumers and produce “cost-effective, instan-
taneous, mass-customized goods and services” through structures that will be
constantly reformed in order to satisfy consumer needs (p. iv). The results are
predicted to include “interactive and innovative marketing and management;
rapid reaction to market requests; …[and] effective networking and partnerships
in order to provide more benefits for all stakeholders” (p. iv). The papers pro-
vide numerous examples of successful (and not so successful) instances of the
beginnings of this transformation. Whether or when the editors’ enthusiatic pre-
diction comes true, however, remains to be seen, but the papers do clearly indi-
cate the dynamic potential for widespread impacts on tourism.
The content of the volume has the potential to be valuable to a variety of
readers. Experts in information technology will find technical papers such as
one by A. Dunzendorfer, J. Küng, and J. Wagner on “data access to heterogen-
ous tourism information systems” (pp. 46–62). Professionals in tourism organi-
zations will find applied papers, such as H.-S. Jung and M. Baker on “assessing
the market effectiveness of the World-Wide Web in national tourism offices”
(pp. 95–102). Managers of tourism enterprises and travel agents will find rel-
evant material such as P. Antoine on the use of the WWW by small hotels
(pp. 120–128) and A.P.S. Olivier on travel agency extranets (pp. 213–223).
Tourism academics will find nearly all of the papers helpful, including D.
Buhalis’ paper on “information technologies in tourism: implications for the
tourism curriculum” (pp. 289–297).
The book consists of nine sections, each with two to five papers. It is important
to note that this volume presents “proceedings” of a conference. It is not an
edited text in which the editors had either commissioned chapters or taken
existing papers and then integrated them into a coherent whole. There is no
introductory chapter to the volume; indeed, there are no introductions to, or
even separator pages between the nine sections, nor clear rationales for the
location of papers by section. There is no concluding chapter presenting com-
mon issues, differences in points of view, or future directions for research.
The papers have widely varying formats and styles. For example, layout varies
with the first paper being printed in what must be a 6-point font, while several
chapters use larger or even multiple fonts and point sizes. Bibliographies are
inconsistent both between and within papers and there are numerous biblio-
graphic errors. Addresses of authors are given for some papers, and not for
others. Some papers begin with an “abstract”, others with a “summary”, some
with “keywords”, and some with none of these. All of this suggests that the papers
were printed as submitted and have not been copy-edited.
That conclusion is reinforced by the numerous punctuation, spelling, and
grammatical errors, including a spelling error (“referred” rather than
“refereed”) (p. iv) in the editors’ preface. A word-processing spell-checker would
have caught most of the problems, but not all. Some of the diagrams are poorly
reproduced, including inconsistent shading (p. 3) and mis-aligned lettering (p.
167). Some tables are badly constructed (e.g., the lack of justification for the
order of rows of percentages in the tables on pp. 20–23). Acronyms are fre-
quently not explained. For example, it is never made clear whether “CTO” (p.
45) refers to “County Tourism Office” or “City Tourism Office”, nor that “SME”
(p. 10) probably refers to “Small and Medium-sized Enterprises”. This reader
knows that “EPOS” technology (p. 12) refers to “End Point of Sale” but never
did figure out what “clever tills or new generation PDQ machines” were.
1072 PUBLICATIONS IN REVIEW
Similarly, information technology terms are often not defined. For example,
data “mining” (p. 11) is not explained to be the process of systematically sifting
through a vast array of data to retrieve useful information or patterns. These
might appear to be minor problems to those familiar with the subject matter
as, presumably, the conference participants were. However, many readers
unfamiliar with such terms would surely be puzzled by the conclusion related
to the above that “Data mining will help to reduce customer defections to
rivals and give sharper focus to product lines” (p. 13). There are numerous
other examples where the authors are clearly speaking to conference parti-
cipants rather than a more general and widespread audience. For example,
the reference to “databases run on the Access program” gives no hint that
“Access” is itself database software available as part of the Microsoft Office ’97
Suite. Similarly, only the informed reader could understand the comment
that, “a more intelligent system could support the manager by defining his
database query by step-wise, fuzzy or rule-based search methodologies” (p. 27).
These deficiencies aside, the volume provides an exciting glimpse of the
rapidly evolving state of information and communication technologies and
their impacts on various aspects of tourism. It would be a useful addition to
academic and professional libraries, but probably would not serve as a text
for a course or merit purchase by an individual. 왎
Assigned 19 March 1998. Submitted 2 June 1998. Resubmitted 30 October 2000. Accepted
13 November 2000.
PII: S0160-7383(01)00012-3
Shirley J. Barnett
Massey University, New Zealand