Marketing information and decision support on the Internet — New opportunities for national, regional and city tourist offices

Since reliable information is the key issue in marketing many tourist offices have used the enormous advances in computing to create systems that more or less extensively record tourism data. Nevertheless, some organizations have encountered difficulties in efficiently using this data for advertising purposes or to plan their marketing strategies in conjunction with various decision support techniques. For this reason alone, it has become essential to create a system that gives users efficient access to all opportunities that computer technology can offer.In this article the author describes recent experiences made during the development and implementation of a tourism marketing-information system (TourMIS), which has proved to be useful in research and consultation for more than 10 years. Its nationwide acceptance turned the system from a Iocal to a distributed decision support system, which caused new problems in data maintenance and the model’s interface.