Workflow Technology: An Application for Tourism Management

Workflow management is of great value for companies since today they have to confront a highly competitive environment, and are in need of reducing costs and swiftly developing new services and products. These demands cannot be met without reconsidering and optimising the way of doing business, developing policy and modifying information systems and applications. Workflow technology facilitates this constant evolution, providing methodologies and software to support: (i) the modelling of processes as workflow specifications, (ii) reengineering business processes in order to optimise them and (iii) workflow automation to generate an implementation from applications.Tourism related organisations and business, like any other type of enterprise, can benefit from this technology and obtain greater efficiency. This will translate into increased customer satisfaction and better efficiency in the developed processes. In this work we intend to apply workflow technology to the management of a hotel by identifying processes. tasks and methods employed in the hotel industry. First we will gain an understanding of the processes involved in hotel management and then model them, from the moment of booking in, to the customer checking out. Thus, our objectives are: (i) to introduce workflow technology and (ii) to apply it to the tourism sector, specifically to a hotel.