Projects 2885
Department of Tourism and Hospitality
Current Projects
- The Development of a Tourism Marketing Information System; Objective: Developing and testing interactive tools which support tourism related management tasks; Funded by the Austrian National Tourism Office and the European Travel Commission; project value approx. € 190,000 (since 1990).
- Understanding urban tourism in Europe and creating a harmonized system of European City Tourism Statistics. The long-term objective of this project is to increase the awareness for regional tourism, particularly city tourism in Europe. Related to this research field is some work for an ESPON project ('Study on spatially relevant aspects of Tourism'), which may lead to a much larger EU funded project within the INTERREG/INTERACT program.
- Intelligent Recommendation for Tourist Destination Decision Making. The purpose of this EU funded project (IST-2000-29474) is to develop and test a recommendation system using case-based reasoning techniques.
- The investigation of domain-specific search engines for supporting the information search process of tourists has led to the creation of www.visiteuropeancities.info, a portal that makes websites for more than 200 city tourist offices accessible to the public. Basic research related to this area includes the investigation of the joint use of content and usage mining techniques in order to enhance interactive online marketing tools.
- There is dramatic growth in internet usage especially for travel information search purposes. Each time an individual uses a website he or she leaves traces on that site. These traces can be collected and used for different purposes such as tracking user behavior, recommending products to the customer in their next visit to the website, or optimizing website usability. Although many tourism organizations are collecting these types of information from their websites, this information is not being used in making managerial decisions. The project directed towards city tourism managers will help to understand a tourism organization’s performance online, develop strategies for the continuous improvement of websites, benchmark organizations against each other, have industry specific analyses and retrieve real insights through the combination with external variables.
Completed Projects
- The European Cities Online Benchmarking Tool is designed and implemented by MODUL Research to help city tourism organizations in administering city tourism statistics in an easy and efficient way. The users can benchmark European cities in different dimensions such as arrivals, bednights, capacity, and occupancy rates of accommodations, making selections for different time spans as well as different source markets, which include British, German, French, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Spanish, total foreign, total domestic and total market. The results are shown as graphical charts that can be saved and used in reports or presentations. The data that is calculated to create the chart can also be saved as an excel document by the users. One advantage of this online tool is it can be customized according to the users’ needs. For instance, the chart settings can be changed, such as the colour of the bars/lines in the charts and the chart title font, size, and colour. In addition, the users can create their own benchmark group of cities for future calculations and save it in their queries. Whenever the users return to the site they can use their own benchmark group, which they created to benchmark with other European cities. Overall, this online tool is beneficial for city tourism organizations for analyzing city tourism statistics and benchmarking of different European cities.