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This research looks at the significance of friends and relatives as an information source for consumers planning holidays. Recent research has largely ignored friends and relatives as destination information sources and has focused instead on the Internet. Two categories of friends and relatives are identified, friends and relatives who live in a destination and friends and relatives who have visited a destination of interest. An exit survey of 1,203 tourists departing a major international destination in Australia found that while the Internet was an important source of information, friends and relatives were as important, if not more, regardless of country of origin and age. These findings indicate that information from friends and relatives and the Internet are complementary rather than exclusive in the minds of consumers.

The tourism industry is seeing unprecedented growth due to the convergence of the internet and growing travel trends. E-tourism digitises the tourism business, including processes, value chains, infrastructure, services and auxiliary industries, to maximise efficiency and effectiveness. It is in response to the globalisation of the tourism sector, which has spurred the introduction of information and communications technologies (ICTs) during the past four decades. ICT can boost travellers' satisfaction by providing pre-trip information about tourism attractions and allowing them to contact vendors directly, obtain accurate information and get the lowest price.

ICT has made the global tourism sector more competitive by providing pre-trip information about tourism attractions, allowing tourists to contact vendors directly, obtain accurate information and get the lowest price. Search engines, transport capacity and network speeds have increased the number of international travellers who use technology to organise and document their trips. E-tourism reduces seasonality, improves consumer communication and boosts reservations and sales. ICT also affects customer behaviour management and future marketing models and supports tourism industry globalisation by providing practical tools to tourism agents to develop and disseminate their offers globally. Strategic behaviours significantly impact tourism, as eliminating intermediaries shortens the distance between client and provider. ICT is a new way to boost tourism demand, which attracts more tourists and generates more revenue while improving the sector.

Internet technology has changed the way information is distributed and the way people do business in the industry. Its impacts have been well studied, but the time element seems to be ignored for the investigation of risks taken and trustworthiness held by online shoppers. The time element should be included because pre-travel plans are usually made and a time lapse does exist between “the time a reservation is made” and “the time the reservation is confirmed.” This study proposes an online purchasing model to investigate the relationships among trustworthiness, time lapse, and online reservation activities. A significant correlation was found between trustworthiness and online reservations but despite such significance, time lapse neither sways the trustworthiness nor leads to low reservation retention.

Internet-enabled commerce activities have evidently been strong in the leisure and tourism industry. The use of the Internet reveals an ever-growing market of millions of business and leisure travelers who use the Internet for travel planning purpose. As segment-based approach is an accepted tool in strategic marketing and helps understand the needs of homogeneous travel planner subpopulations, this study suggests a framework as the guideline and procedure to improve the segmentation approach. The main aim is to increase understanding of the growing Internet travel market by accurately classifying the Internet travel planners. Following the procedures methodically shown in the framework, the study conducted multiple complementary statistical techniques to cross validate statistical results found in each step. The typology of Internet travel planners was therefore identified systematically with great accuracy and validity. The typology consists of four groups of Internet travel planners: sensate, deal, defensive, and totemic. Based on the major characteristics of each group, the study also provided discussions and suggestions for the implementation of the typology to develop successful e-commerce. The findings offer academia and practitioners a paradigm for strategic marketing.

Geotechnologies have a long tradition in several areas of society and research. The recent development of the ‘Internet of Everything’ (IoE) and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technologies opened several doors to the contribution of tourism. Emergent technologies contributions to tourism and planning such as web mapping, augmented reality (AR), crowdsourcing and crowdsensing are relatively recent, and there is a lack of research around their potential for Creative Tourism enhancement. For example, combining web mapping with AR or storytelling can be an excellent contribution to operators, planners and tourists. For research purposes, new opportunities are open, particularly by integrating community-shared data. It is well known for the popularity of social networks, the exponential growth of photo sharing, but few studies have been implemented to understand their contribution to research. This chapter focuses on emerging geotechnologies concerning cultural mapping, Creative Tourism and sustainability. Since it is a new growing niche, more research is needed to develop and understand the potential of new approaches. Besides traditional techniques such as quantitative (e.g. surveys) and qualitative ones (e.g. interviews, focus groups and world café), it revises the role of geotechnologies on Creative Tourism development and growing activities. Results from case studies from Europe are analysed.

Purpose — In the context of evaluating transportation and carbon emission policies, improve weekly activity and mobility scheduling survey methodology in order to enhance data quality while reducing costs and decreasing respondent burden for designing continuous self-administered surveys that are predominantly passive (or computer-assisted).

Approach — Evaluate a set of functionalities deployed in a web travel survey interface (2009) and compare with a pencil-and-paper survey (2002–2003) deployed in Quebec City that sought similar data about weekly mobility. The first used a pencil-and-paper approach complemented by interviews and telecommunications. The second used applets developed in Java, and Google Maps in order to assist geocoding of activity places and the reporting of actual trips into a relational database, while using email to recruit and support respondents.

Implications — Both of these surveys had to address specific technical and privacy challenges during deployment, making their comparison relevant for discussing some of the impacts of information technologies on spatiotemporal data quality, conviviality of survey procedure, respondents' motivation and privacy protection.

Limitations — While neither of these surveys employed movement-aware mobile devices, such as GPS loggers, some of the lessons learnt are relevant to the design issues raised by the increasing deployment of such devices in travel surveys, and by the growing need to manage complex surveys over extended observation periods.