MODUL University Vienna hosted the 5th ECM & ETC Joint TourMIS Workshop

The 5th ECM & ETC Joint TourMIS Users’ Workshop took place at MODUL University, in Vienna, September 3-4, 2009. The 81 delegates attending the event represented city and national tourist organizations, universities and companies from the hospitality and tourism industry from 25 different countries in Europe.

The first day of the workshop offered training on the usage of the TourMIS, the online marketing information-system for tourism managers (www.tourmis.info [1]). The morning session was devoted to train the users about tourism statistics and data input functions. The afternoon presentations focussed on the use of the system to perform analyses, such as benchmarking destinations' performance, assessing seasonality, benchmarking prices for tourism related services and monitoring the demand for cultural attraction. The day ended with the presentation of the newest implementation of the system, an innovative application to forecast tourism demand [1].

During the second day experts and representatives of the tourism and media industries shared their knowledge in the attempt to shed light on one of the most discussed topic of the moment: Web 2.0 marketing. City and National Tourist Offices presented how they moved from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0, shared their impressions and discussed about the still open questions concerning this type of marketing activities, such as the problem of tracking and assessing the performance of social-web based marketing activities. The contributions of experts from the industry and academia unveiled aspects of social webbers' profile and attitudes in using the Internet, provided suggestions on how to create an attractive global travel 2.0 portal and presented the state-of-the-art methodology to automatically analyze online media and user‐generated content to measure media coverage, reputation, to assess the impact of events and to reveale changes in destination profile.

The event is an initiative jointly organized by European Cities Marketing [2], European Travel Commission [3] & MODUL University Vienna [4] every year. The event was generously sponsored by the Austrian National Tourist Office [5] and the Vienna Tourist Board [6].

All the presentations and pictures of the event can be downloaded from this link [7].

More about TourMIS

• www.tourmis.info [1]
• TourMIS Awarded UNWTO's Price on Innovation in Tourism Enterprises by the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) [8]
• TourMIS Users' Workshop 2008 [9]

Contact
Valeria Croce (MA), MODUL University Vienna
Department of Tourism and Hospitality Management
Am Kahlenberg 1, 1190 Wien, Austria
valeria.croce@modul.ac.at [10] | www.modul.ac.at/croce [11]