Ull ph dproposals

PhD Subject Proposal

Erasmus Mundus Sustainable eTourism Programme

Nov.2011 - Sep. 2014 (34 months) Country: France University: Université Lumière Lyon 2 Domain: E-tourism (business and management, ICT) Doctorate Title: Internet usage amongst Thai travel agencies: A pilot study

Abstract (context of research, objectives, methodology... - 1 page min, 2 pages max): Although the Internet is a commonly available technology, awareness of its functionality, resources and expertise is required. It is observed that many small and medium tourism enterprises (SMTEs) are either not aware of this or do not possess or have ready access to resources needed to make the opportunities potentially available (Alexander 2000). Among these opportunities for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) is to harness the benefits of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in an affordable, simple way, and to reach new customers and suppliers as ICTs offer customers cheap, global reach to seek out new suppliers. The tourism industry has been found to be largely dominated by SMEs where travel agencies (TAs) are typically classified as small businesses (Standing, Borbely and Vasudavan 1999; Gammack, Molinar, Chu and Chanpayom 2004). ICTs have thus become a vital competitive advantage for TAs. The development of the internet applications has changed buying habits of tourism products. Travel and tourism has become the single largest category of products/services sold over the Internet. In this sense, the development of the internet as a marketing channel for tourism products and services has affected retail travel agencies as SMEs. Wholesale travel agencies can create portals (e-dreams) and traditional travel agencies can obtain many advantages from using the internet to offer complementary services to their customers. The travel agencies’ presence in the internet is highly appreciated by the customers, because it often means a reduction in the time needed to purchase services, as well as greater convenience, without renouncing at any time the personal advice available from a firm specializing in various categories of tourism products (Álvarez et al. 2007). For tourism players, internet applications become their electronic interface to the world, where services are defined from a supplier and a consumer perspective. Among those players are travel supermarkets (online booking servers), which their strategic goal is to be among enterprises that will occupy a strategic position in this future market.

This research project tries to explore internet adoption and use of Thai TAs. It indicates their web presence level, reasons, and perceived benefits of adoption. Investigating internet-derived challenges for TAs is another focus area of this study. Research Gap Despite the impressive growth rates of the online travel market, the market share of online travel sales in the total travel market still remains relatively small, being estimated at 19.4% in 2007 and 22.5% in 2008 (Patricia 2008). Studies in this area indicate that, regardless of the technological revolution experienced in the tourism industry and the opportunities it offers, TAs have traditionally been reluctant to perfect utilizing of ICTs (Usoro 2007) and some TAs only have interactive websites (Intrapairot and Srivihok 2003). Moreover, SMEs are not adopting the internet with the same speed as their large counterparts do (Kula and Tatoglu 2003). The objectives of this research are to: a) Establish the level of online adoption among Thai TAs, b) Identify the current reasons of internet usage among TAs, c) Identify the benefits for TAs associated with internet adoption, d) Define barriers of involving TAs in internet adoption and, e) Finally indicates some suggestions on how to overcome the TAs’ challenges To obtain an overview of Thai travel agents’ internet use, a pilot study questionnaire-based was conducted with 50 randomly selected travel agents based in Chiang Mai and Bangkok. A questionnaire was designed in English language and translated back into Thai language to ensure questions comprehensibility. Keywords (3 to 5) ICTs adoption, Internet, SMEs, Travel Agencies, Thailand, Tourism industry Publications related to the subject (2 to 3 references): - Álvarez, L. S., Martín, A. D. and Casielles, R. V. 2007. Relationship marketing and information and communication technologies: Analysis of retail travel agencies. Journal of Travel Research, 45, (4) 453-463. - Chen, J. and McQueen, R. 2008. Factors affecting e-commerce stages of growth in small Chinese firms in New Zealand: an analysis of adoption motivators and inhibitors. Journal of Global Information Management, 16, (1) 26-60. - Harindranath, G., Dyerson, R. and Barnes, D. 2008. ICT adoption and use in UK SMEs: a failure of initiatives? The Electronic Journal of Information Systems Evaluation, 11 (2)91-96

PhD Subject Proposal

Erasmus Mundus Sustainable eTourism Programme

Nov.2011 - Sep. 2014 (34 months) Country: France University: Université Lumière Lyon 2 Domain: E-tourism (business and management, ICT) Doctorate Title: Intra Web site comparison in the tourism industry as a means for user engagement

Abstract (context of research, objectives, methodology... - 1 page min, 2 pages max): Recent research is looking at ways to consistently keep consumers on Web sites (Pavlou and Geffen, 2004), make users perceive the usefulness (Davis, 1989) and content of the sites (Rosen and Purinton, 2004), whilst trying to prevent them from switching to other sites. Although recent industry attention is being given to the term Web site engagement, it has not been properly defined within academic literature. To engage is to ‘involve (a person or his or her attention) intensely’. The ability to retain customers online and prolong the duration of each stay is one of the keys factors to e-commerce success (Lin, 2007). Web content has been identified as one of the main factors contributing to repeat visits to Web sites (Rosen and Purinton, 2004). In particular, the travel industry is largely information driven and travel sites allow customers to search, select or arrange travel and holiday packages, as well as making reservations and bookings themselves (van Riel, Semeijn and Pauwels, 2004). However, there is no evidence that the comparison of information presented on e-commerce web sites Web sites, influences user engagement. The objective of this research is to contribute to this existing gap in knowledge. 1) Propose a formal definition of engagement valid within the framework of e-commerce travel Web sites. 2) Research the influence of comparison, within an information structure, on the engagement of users in e-commerce travel Web sites. 3) Determine the effects of user engagement within e-commerce travel Web sites. 4) Propose a methodology to model the influence of information comparison on engagement and the effects of engagement on users. In order to identify the factors, which determine Web site engagement within an e-commerce environment, a methodology based on discriminant analysis (Tarafdar and Zhang, 2008; Wang and Emurian, 2005) will be considered. The aim of this research is to determine how engagement within an e-commerce environment is influenced by information comparison. Keywords (3 to 5)

Web site comparison, user engagement, Internet, information, e-commerce Publications related to the subject (2 to 3 references): - LI, D.; BROWNE, G.J.; WETHERBE, J.C. (2007): ‘Online Consumers' Switching Behaviour: A Buyer-Seller Relationship Perspective’. Journal of Electronic Commerce in Organizations, Vol. 5 (1), pp. 30-36, 38-42. - LIN, J.C-C (2007): ‘Online stickiness: its antecedents and effect on purchasing intention’. Behaviour and Information Technology, Vol. 26 (6), pp. 507-516. - ZAICHKOWSKY, J.L (1985): ‘Measuring the Involvement Construct’. Journal of Consumer Research, Vol. 12. pp. 341-352.

PhD Subject Proposal

Erasmus Mundus Sustainable eTourism Programme

Nov.2011 - Sep. 2014 (34 months) Country: France University: Université Lumière Lyon 2 Domain: marketing and management Doctorate Title: A comparative study of cultural tourism development in the Asian GMS countries: the case of Thailand and China

Abstract (context of research, objectives, methodology... - 1 page min, 2 pages max): Tourism is the world’s largest industry and it was projected to be the world’s largest employer by the year 2000. Indeed, cultural/heritage tourism is the fastest growing segment of the tourism industry because there is a trend toward an increased specialization among tourists. This trend is evident in the rise in the volume of tourists who seek adventure, culture, history, archaeology and interaction with local people. Especially, nowadays people’ interest in travelling to cultural/ heritage destinations has increased recently and is expected to continue. For example, cultural/heritage sites are among the most preferred tourism experiences in Thailand. Because of people’s inclination to seek out novelty, including that of traditional cultures, heritage tourism has become a major “new” area of tourism demand, which almost all Policy makers are now aware of and anxious to develop. Heritage tourism, as a part of the broader category of “cultural tourism”, is now a major pillar of the nascent tourism strategy of many countries. Cultural/heritage tourism strategies in various countries have in common that they are a major growth area, that they can be used to boost local culture, and that they can aid the seasonal and geographic spread of tourism. This research will evaluate Thailand’s potential in the tourism industry and especially cultural tourism development and tries to compare it with China because of their regional proximities and similarities in culture, attractions, and religion. The main goals of this research are:

1- Understanding and evaluating of accelerating factors in cultural tourism development both in Thailand and China

2- Understanding and evaluation of decelerating factors in cultural tourism both in Thailand and China.

This analysis is based on information gathered through electronic data, discussion with heritage tourism managers and stakeholder workshops. Interview with heritage representative in Thailand and tourists. Cultural Heritage Corporation provided the detail of their regional organizational structure and how the cooperation functions. Keywords (3 to 5)

Cultural tourism, comparative study, tourist behaviour, marketing, world heritage Publications related to the subject (2 to 3 references): - Craik, J . (1997). The culture of tourism. In C. Rojek and J.Urry, Touring cultures: Transformations of travel and theory (pp. 1 13-1 36). New York: Routledge. - Cohen, E. (1 995). Contemporary tourism - Trends and challenges: Sustainable authenticity or contrived post-modernity?. In R. Butler and D. Pearce, Change in - Garrod, B. & Fyall, A. (2000). Managing heritage tourism. Annals of Tourism Research, 27(2), 682-708.

PhD Subject Proposal

Erasmus Mundus Sustainable eTourism Programme

Nov.2011 - Sep. 2014 (34 months) Country: France University: Université Lumière Lyon 2 Domain: tourism business and management Doctorate Title: Business travellers and France as business destination

Abstract (context of research, objectives, methodology... - 1 page min, 2 pages max): Business travel is considered to be the backbone of the tourism industry. Research has shown that business tourism has grown and continues to experience growth as a segment of the tourism industry. This phenomenon has caused governments and other private organisations to give this sector much attention, as it contributes significantly to the economic development of most countries. In this respect, major cities and capital cities of most countries are therefore planned, designed and organised in a way to meet the demands of this sector, hence attracting certain markets into the region, and for that matter quality tourists also. According to Lowitt (2001), the activities of business tourism represent the customer segment with the highest value. The objectives of this research project are: to explain the systems of categorizing business travellers; to describe how the France business community tries to attract business travellers to the destination; to describe what measures the hospitality industry takes to create products to suit the needs of the business travel group; to analyze the satisfaction of Asian business tourists to France as a business destination and identify holes in services provided by the tourism and hospitality industry in meeting the needs of business travellers – pointing out new opportunities and discussing how to fill in the existing gaps in the industry system. And finally, create awareness of the importance of the potential Asian business traveller to the tourism and hospitality industry in France. The qualitative research based on interview with Business travellers and France, as a business destination, discusses different approaches on how to view the types of guests to the destination, providing three major groups. It identifies what the destination could offer them as service providers, with regards to their needs and expectations, in order to gain customer satisfaction. Keywords (3 to 5)

Business traveller, business destination, service providers in the tourism and hospitality industry, service quality / customer satisfaction. Publications related to the subject (2 to 3 references): - Cook R.A., Yale L.J., Marqua J.J. (2002). Tourism, The business of Travel. Second Edition. New Jersey: Pearson Education, Inc., Upper Saddle River. - Brent J.R., Ritchie, Goeldner C.R. (2003). Travel Tourism and Hospitality Research. A handbook for managers and researchers. Second Edition. (Concepts, Definitions, and Measures used in Travel and tourism research, Contributed by Robin Chadwick) - Bradley A., Hall T., Harrison M. (2002), Selling Cities. Promoting New Images for Meetings Tourism. Cities, Vol.19 No.1. UK: Elsevier Science.

PhD Subject Proposal Erasmus Mundus Sustainable eTourism Programme

Nov.2011 - Sep. 2014 (34 months) Country: France University: Univetsity Lumiere Lyon 2 Domain (Computer Science, Management, Economics...): Computer Science Doctorate Title: Computer Science Abstract (context of reserach, objectives, methodology... - 1 page min, 2 pages max):

A Multi-Agent System for dynamic e-Tourism Services Composition. Sustainable E-Tourism project aims at helping tourism enterprises for improving the share of knowledge and ideas among their partners. It encourages collaboration between tourism partners and proposes a methodology and an Information and Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructure to enhance the Tourism service. Internet and web technologies have changed significantly the relationship between communities, customers and retailers. Customers can access to virtually unlimited tourism products and services selection, precisely they have more control over any transaction, which resulted in great competition. More importantly, it is the speed of changes in tourism industry which is directly resulting from technology advances. Efficient knowledge sharing within and between tourism clusters is required in order to maintain the collaboration sustainability. In this context, the aim of this PhD study is to propose a framework which combines multi-agent techniques with semantic web services to enable dynamic, context-aware service composition, thus providing users with relevant high level services depending on their current context and activity. In a service-oriented approach, we can distinguish two abstraction levels in proposed services. On the one hand, basic services are elementary functionalities, usually provided by devices in the environment. On the other hand, composite services aggregate a set of functionalities into higher level applications, closer to the users’ actual needs. Thus, service composition enables to fill the abstraction gap between user activity and needs and elementary service level. As an answer to service composition issues, our proposal in this PhD work is to investigate a Multi-Agent System (MAS) as a complement to a service-oriented approach towards adaptable and reconfigurable tourism environment, in which users interactions will become simple and intuitive. We aim to use semantic service descriptions to abstractly describe services’ functionalities. We consider that descriptions can be provided by various sources (computers, GPS, mobile phone,...), since they do not need to comply with a commonly defined standard. Using such descriptions, service agents will dynamically discover and enhance their

capabilities with existing services. Depending on their interests or their current role in an activity, agents can either discover services to answer a current need or pro-actively provision services for expected use. A part from these service agents, various agents handle other information that will have an impact on the behavior of the system. The architecture required to developp the Multi-Agent System and to support web services will be implemented using the JADE plateform (Java programing language) and the most important standards used in web services architectures as XML-RPC (XML Remote Procedure Call) and SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), both of these standards are XML-based. As an example to show how web services can be used in the tourism domain, we can imagine a distributed tourism agency infrastructure built on web services providing functionalities such as distributed search, authentication, inter-tourism agencies requests, documents or catalogues ordering and payment. These web services would be combined by a particular application to offer an environment for reaching information resources that is tailored to the tourism community. Keywords (3 to 5) : Multi-Agent System, Knowledge Management, SOA, e-Tourism Services composition, Publications related to the subject (2 to 3 references): - Korhonen, J., Pajunen, J., & Puustjarvi, J. (2003). Automatic composition of Web Services workflows using a semantic agent. In Proceedings of the IEEE/WIC International Conference on Web Intelligence (WI’03), Beijing, China, pp. 566–569. - M. Bichler, K.J. Lin, Service-oriented computing, IEEE Computer 39 (3), 2006, pp.99–101. - Michael Wooldridge (2009) ”An intrduction to Multi-Agent Systems” Wiley Ed. May 2009.

PhD Subject Proposal

Erasmus Mundus Sustainable eTourism Programme

Nov.2011 - Sep. 2014 (34 months) Country: France University: Université Lumiere Lyon 2 Laboratory/Department: LIESP –Lyon 2 Laboratory Domain (Computer Science, Management, Economics...) : Computer Science Doctorate Title: Computer Science Abstract (context of reserach, objectives, methodology... - 1 page min, 2 pages max):

A Multi-Agent System for dynamic e-Tourism Services Composition. Sustainable E-Tourism project aims at helping tourism enterprises for improving the share of knowledge and ideas among their partners. It encourages collaboration between tourism partners and proposes a methodology and an Information and Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructure to enhance the Tourism service. Internet and web technologies have changed significantly the relationship between communities, customers and retailers. Customers can access to virtually unlimited tourism products and services selection, precisely they have more control over any transaction, which resulted in great competition. More importantly, it is the speed of changes in tourism industry which is directly resulting from technology advances. Efficient knowledge sharing within and between tourism clusters is required in order to maintain the collaboration sustainability. In this context, the aim of this PhD study is to propose a framework which combines multi-agent techniques with semantic web services to enable dynamic, context-aware service composition, thus providing users with relevant high level services depending on their current context and activity. In a service-oriented approach, we can distinguish two abstraction levels in proposed services. On the one hand, basic services are elementary functionalities, usually provided by devices in the environment. On the other hand, composite services aggregate a set of functionalities into higher level applications, closer to the users’ actual needs. Thus, service composition enables to fill the abstraction gap between user activity and needs and elementary service level. As an answer to service composition issues, our proposal in this PhD work is to investigate a Multi-Agent System (MAS) as a complement to a service-oriented approach towards adaptable and reconfigurable tourism environment, in which users interactions will become simple and intuitive. We aim to use semantic service descriptions to abstractly describe services’ functionalities. We consider that descriptions can be provided by various sources (computers, GPS, mobile phone,...), since they do not need to comply with a commonly defined standard.

Using such descriptions, service agents will dynamically discover and enhance their capabilities with existing services. Depending on their interests or their current role in an activity, agents can either discover services to answer a current need or pro-actively provision services for expected use. A part from these service agents, various agents handle other information that will have an impact on the behavior of the system. The architecture required to developp the Multi-Agent System and to support web services will be implemented using the JADE plateform (Java programing language) and the most important standards used in web services architectures as XML-RPC (XML Remote Procedure Call) and SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), both of these standards are XML-based. As an example to show how web services can be used in the tourism domain, we can imagine a distributed tourism agency infrastructure built on web services providing functionalities such as distributed search, authentication, inter-tourism agencies requests, documents or catalogues ordering and payment. These web services would be combined by a particular application to offer an environment for reaching information resources that is tailored to the tourism community. Keywords (3 to 5) : Multi-Agent System, Knowledge Management, SOA, e-Tourism Services composition, Publications related to the subject (2 to 3 references): - Korhonen, J., Pajunen, J., & Puustjarvi, J. (2003). Automatic composition of Web Services workflows using a semantic agent. In Proceedings of the IEEE/WIC International Conference on Web Intelligence (WI’03), Beijing, China, pp. 566–569. - M. Bichler, K.J. Lin, Service-oriented computing, IEEE Computer 39 (3), 2006, pp.99–101. - Michael Wooldridge (2009) ”An intrduction to Multi-Agent Systems” Wiley Ed. May 2009.