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Business Intelligence in Tourism

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Handbook of e-Tourism

Abstract

Business intelligence encompasses all activities dealing with collecting, storing/managing, and analyzing business-relevant data with the objective of generating knowledge as input to decision support. Business intelligence is often used as an umbrella term for data warehousing, reporting and OLAP (online analytical processing), MIS/DSS, and data mining, respectively.

If we count all topics listed above, it is obvious that business intelligence has quite a long history also in the tourism domain. As early examples in tourism, we can identify the DINAMO system introduced by American Airlines already in 1988 or TourMIS in 1998.

The widespread use of ICT, especially the uptake of the Internet and social media, led to an increase of available data on customers, competitors, and the whole market in all major business domains, including tourism. More powerful hardware and sophisticated methods to store and analyze such data turned business intelligence into one of the fastest-growing technologies and most challenging areas in the last decade.

This chapter gives an overview on the topic of business intelligence and all technical components of a BI architecture (i.e., information extraction and transformation, data warehousing, and different mechanisms and tools to access and analyze data, like reporting or OLAP tools, dashboards, or data mining toolsets). Moreover, the chapter looks at the history of BI in tourism and presents and discusses typical application scenarios in tourism. Finally, we look at current trends and latest developments in the area of business intelligence and their expected implications for the tourism domain.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Digital Transformation, Ravensburg-Weingarten University of Applied Sciences, Weingarten, Germany

    Wolfram Höpken

  2. Department of Economics, Geography, Law and Tourism, European Tourism Research Institute (ETOUR), Mid-Sweden University, Östersund, Sweden

    Matthias Fuchs

Authors
  1. Wolfram Höpken
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  2. Matthias Fuchs
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Wolfram Höpken .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Hospitality and Tourism Management, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA, USA

    Zheng Xiang

  2. Department of Tourism Studies and Geography, Mid Sweden University, Östersund, Sweden

    Matthias Fuchs

  3. Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Ulrike Gretzel

  4. Department of Business Informatics, University of Applied Sciences Ravensburg-Weingarten, Weingarten, Germany

    Wolfram Höpken

Section Editor information

  1. Institute of Digital Transformation, University of Applied Sciences Ravensburg-Weingarten, Weingarten, Germany

    Wolfram Höpken

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Höpken, W., Fuchs, M. (2021). Business Intelligence in Tourism. In: Xiang, Z., Fuchs, M., Gretzel, U., Höpken, W. (eds) Handbook of e-Tourism. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05324-6_3-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05324-6_3-1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-05324-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-05324-6

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