Disneyland How Is ICT Applied

¶ … Disneyland

How is ICT Applied to the Tourism and Hospitality Industries?

Nearly every industry in today's economy uses ICT to some extent. This paper examines the specific ways in which the tourism and hospitality use information and communication technology (often abbreviated to ICT) as key aspects of their overall business strategy. While originally the term generally referred to the technology (that is, the hardware) involved, the term now includes a broader range of hardware, software, and business organization.

The term ICT now often refers to an overall business strategy that emphasizes the importance of an overall strategy that emphasizes the importance of an integrated communications system throughout the entire business. Again, this refers both to the physical integration of computers, software, phone systems or wireless systems, back-up systems, etc. The other key aspect of integrated ICT systems is the emphasis on an integrated message in both internal and external communications. This means that corporate communications directed at employees should be in line with communications aimed at both stockholders and customers.

Such an integrated strategy is especially important in an industry in which there are a number of different offices that are widely spread in geographic terms, a condition that is often true for both the hospitality and tourist industries. Before examining a specific website to determine the quality of its ITC program and how integrated its message is, I will provide a very brief definition of what is included in the tourism and hospitality industries. What is referred to by these economic sectors might seem obvious, but they comprise more different sub-categories than most people realize.

The hospitality industry (or sector) is generally agreed on to include a range of fields that are themselves part of the much larger service industry. Specific to this sector are restaurants, hotels and motels, adventure and theme parks (such as Disneyland), cruises and train tours (as opposed to trains used purely for transportation), all of the requirements for supplying and staffing each of these types of businesses, casinos and other gambling arenas, the varieties of planning that are required to make all of these types of businesses run smoothly, and transportation as it is associated with traveling to any of these sites,

The hospitality industry requires in almost all cases a certain level of leisure and income that is not required for subsistence. (Exceptions could include such activities as staying in a hotel while a member of the family is in a nearby hospital, etc.). Because of this, the industry is centered in wealthier countries in terms of where the businesses themselves are located, even though many of the destinations are in developing countries.

The complexity of the hospitality industry is only suggested at by the above description since each of these loci include a wide range of different professions, each requiring very different skills. Chefs, concierges who speak several languages, florists, landscape designers, and janitors must all perform their jobs well if the hospitality location is to succeed.

The complexity of the human resources challenges as well as the day-to-day challenges required in managing one of these businesses would hardly be possible without a highly effective and well-integrated IT system.

Even more than the hospitality industry, the tourism industry is important to national economies, especially for some nations, which depend strenuously on the foreign currencies that tourists bring to their countries. Tourism is probably most often thought of as travel for pleasure and recreation. This is certainly an important part of what tourism is; however, when official statistics are provided these statistics almost always include travel for businesses purposes. This addition makes sense if one remembers that business travelers often participate in more obvious tourist activities (such as visiting museums and eating at restaurants) when they are traveling.

Of course, not all travelers are tourists. The idea of tourism includes the concepts of traveling to a place that one does not usually go and with which one is not intimately familiar. It also comprises the idea of a relatively short period of time: In this way it is distinguished from immigration.

One of the most obvious ways in which to assess the communication strategies and effectiveness of a company is the quality of its website. The remainder of this paper examines a specific website and then moves on more generally to discuss the criteria by which websites (and a company's degree of efficient and integrated communication strategies) may be assessed.

Disneyland's Electronic Front Gate

Anyone who has ever visited one of the Disney parks understands that the company is dedicated to making a good first impression: Walking into the park and down Main Street whisks one quickly (indeed essentially immediately) into a world of make-believe, a psychological journey emphasized by the appearance of Sleeping Beauty's castle rising up before one.

In contrast to the carefully orchestrated visual mapping of the actual Disney parks, the website for the main park (http://disneyland.disney.go.com/) is far less visually appealing. The designers of the site seem to have forgotten that on the internet less is indeed more. Even when a great deal of information must be conveyed to the user of the site, the homepage should never be so cluttered that it has the effect of intimidating the user. Web evaluation must always include how relatively easy it is for the average user to find what s/he is most likely to need on the site as well as how appealing the site is in emotional, psychological, and aesthetic terms.

The Disneyland site has a significant advantage over other similarly designed sites. The fact that it is visually not compelling is not likely to discourage most people from visiting Disneyland in the way that a similarly uncompelling site for a small business might indeed turn a viewer away and cost the company a sale. However, a site such as the one being examined here might well prompt a user to call the park instead of using the online resources, a strategy that is more costly for the company.

ICT and Web Evaluation Literature Review

The introductory section of this paper touched briefly on some of the criteria by which ITC and websites can be assessed. Each company as well as each industry has specific needs and so each also has specific requirements for its communication systems. However, there are a number of criteria that are generally considered to be highly important and possibly even indispensible. One of these criteria is that the communication system is sufficiently integrated that users of the system are not required to jury-rig connections between different parts of the system.

Businesses have needed to become ever-more efficient in our globalized economy, especially as the current recession has proven to be so resistant to interventionary attempts. A company without a communication strategy that links internal processes to key marketing concepts and goals will most certainly not succeed.

This is true even for such a quasi-monopolistic (and certainly culturally hegemonic) corporation as Disney. But an efficient and integrated ITC system is essential not only for improving the marketing aspects of a company. It is also essential for making the company a welcoming place to work.

Given the demands placed on individuals in the hospitality and tourism industries (in which so many employees are faced daily with often difficult-to-deal-with members of the public), having employees who are happy with their work situations is no small aspect of a well-run corporation. A major part of the way in which employees can stay connected to a corporation's overall mission so that they can provide daily services to reinforce that mission is the ways in which they are connected to each other through computers, that is, through the company's ITC system.

Such electronic connections are important to any company; however, they are especially important to large corporations that (like Disney) have locations in many countries. The mobility of a company's services and/or products in today's world requires a communication system that supports easy communication not just from one cubicle to another but also from one continent to another.

The above comments are focused on the key importance of a company's communication strategy. Such a strategy consists of a number of different types of hardware, and of course if such hardware fails then the system itself will collapse, albeit temporarily. More important to a corporation's overall successful ITC program is the intellectual and organizational rationale for the way that the company has of conducting its business the way it does. Disney is a key example of an American company that has been able to expand significantly while making relatively few accommodations to other countries, or at least relatively few significant ones.

Assessing the effectiveness of a company's marketing as evidenced through its web presence requires two separate steps. The first is the one that has been being discussed above: The success of a marketing strategy can never be addressed in absolute terms but most be considered in the context of how it meshes with current market conditions and demands.

Within this framework -- that is, within the context of a specific, historical set of market conditions -- we can now move on to assess the effectiveness of a website. It is hard to imagine (indeed, impossible to imagine) how a large company could not have a web presence as a central part of its marketing campaign. However, this does not that the company's website is as effective as it might be, or even very effective at all.

One of the consequences of the fact that websites have become both ubiquitous and necessary is that there is actually less pressure on companies to make their websites as elegant and effective as they used to be. In the early days of web marketing, websites were in large measure still peripheral. This meant that most consumers relied on older methods of advertising (such as newspaper ads) and were lured onto the web by websites that were especially clever or alluring.

Now the default method of marketing and advertising is web-based, which means that the web is likely to be the first place that an individual looks when trying to find out basic information about a company. Because of this, the websites do not have to sparkle to catch the attention of the consumer. Since many of the other forms of advertising no longer exist or no longer have the strength that they once had, people are often more or less stuck with what they find on the company's website. Our standards for website design have been distinctly lowered.

This does not mean that there are not still standards for what makes a good website. There is even fairly wide agreement as to what makes the best websites. This does not, of course, mean that companies follow these principles, as is clear from the Disney site being analyzed here. A key reason why Disney marketers may not be as user-friendly as one might have thought they would be: They know that users are willing to put up with a certain amount of inconvenience on a site if they are (already) convinced that they are interested in the products that this company is putting forward.

Most marketing strategies and tools put your business "in their face." Not so with the web. This is a forum where people seek your product out and when they find you they are finding hundreds, if not thousands, of your competitors at the same time. One bad experience and they'll simply go next door. Why should they be loyal when there is so much to choose from? The one exception to this is with e-commerce, where users will put up with a degree of discomfort in order to use a tried, tested and safe supplier, but for the rest of us who are merely using the web as an advertising portal, there is no such tolerance.

The Disney Corporation can indeed be thought of as a "tried, tested and safe supplier." Moreover, it is effectively a monopoly: While there are a number of companies that produce movies and related merchandise, none has the economic heft and cultural reach as the Disney corporation. This no doubt has played into the company's carelessness -- for really, this does seem to be the most accurate possible term -- in creating a website that is busy, fussy, overly complicated, and -- if one does not have fast wireless service -- far too slow to load.

In the next sections I will discuss a brief experiment that I conducted about the effectiveness of the Disney website. The website will be assessed for a set of key attributes: Accuracy, authority, objectivity, coverage, and contents. These attributes are not equally important, either in terms of websites in general or in terms of how different users assess a website. (In other words, no website can be all things to all people.) However, these attributes are generally seen as being key in terms of assessing the effectiveness of a website for most users.

Methodology

The website was assessed by 26 individuals who were asked five questions about the site. They were asked to consider the following criteria:

1. Did the website seem to be accurate? This includes whether the purpose of the site is clear, including why it was put up? Does the text make sense? Is it clear why the site was put up?

2. The information should be up-to-date and all the links should work.

3. The website should be accessible without special software (unless it is available for free and quick to download) or technical requirements.

Each of the people surveyed was asked ten questions that covered the above topics. After the results were collected (in written form), the results were analyzed.

The questions that were asked of each one of the subjects are the following. The subjects had to choose between only two answers: "yes" or "no." such a format does have limitations, of course, in that sometimes subjects may believe that a more accurate answer might be "sometimes" or "maybe." However, a simple yes/no answer format was used because this format made it easier to analyze the information received.

1. Is the site easy to navigate through and can you find what you want easily?

2. Is the site free from too many distracting images, animations, colors, wild backgrounds, and sounds?

3. Is the content meaningful and useful?

4. Is the Web site designed to teach you something?

5. Is there a well-known organization or institution associated with or sponsoring the site?

6. Is the organization or institution associated with the site from an educational institution (.edu), from an organization (.org) or from the government (.gov)?

7. Do the pages load quickly?

8. Is there a bibliography of the authors resources included?

9. Is the Web site designed to teach you something?

10. Are the author's credentials are given?

Results and analysis

The results of the survey were surprising in some ways and predictable in other ways. The following summarizes the results while at the same time offering possible explanations for the way in which the subjects responded the way in which they did.

For the first question (Is the site easy to navigate through and can you find what you want easily?), 40% said yes. I was surprised by this response because it seemed clear to me that the site is definitely not easy to navigate. I believe that the fact that so many of my respondents answered yes to this question arises for one (or both) of two different reasons. The first is that people have different ways of determining whether or not a site is well-designed. I also believe that it is possible that because Disneyland is such a well-known part of our culture that people looking at the website felt that they already know everything about it and so are not really looking at the site to get more information.

The responses to the second question (Is the site free from too many distracting images, animations, colors, wild backgrounds, and sounds?) seemed to contradict the answers to the first question. Only five of the 26 people answered that the site was free from too many distractions. I personally agree with this assessment after having explored the site. However, what puzzles me is that the first two answers seem to contradict each other.

I do not understand how so many people could find the site easy to navigate and then also criticize the site for being distracting. I think that the most important thing that I learned from these two questions is not so much about the design of the site but more about how people can differ in the way in which they interpret questions. There is not necessarily a correct way to answer a question. This is obvious when I look back on the question. But before I asked the questions I now realize that I just assumed that people would agree with me. I think that this is probably something that happens a lot: We just assume that people will agree with us.

For question number three (Is the content meaningful and useful?) 75% of the people answered "yes." I think that the fact that this is the site for a well-known company influenced this answer. As noted above, for companies that are not as well-known or do not have significant loyalty from a customer basis have to have a better website to attract customers. However, a well-known company or a company whose products people already know that they want the website can be less well designed.

Clearly the Disney company is a very well-known company and its products (tickets to its parks) are something that people know about. Many people have wanted to go to Disneyland or Disneyworld for a long time (or have already gone there and would like to back again) and so they are willing to spend as much time as it takes to navigate the site.

This is also an important thing that I learned from doing this survey: People bring their expectations to a website. The content and design of a website are important, but so are people's ideas about what they will find and how much they want to get the product. This is in some ways like the price of an object in a store and how hard it is to get. We are willing to pay a higher price and to go to four or five different stores to buy something we really want.

The fourth question (Is the Web site designed to teach you something?) does not really apply to this site. I knew this already when I picked the questions but I included this question to see how people would answer it. I thought it would be interesting to ask a question that I thought everyone would answer "no" to. In fact most people answered "no" but about one-quarter of the people answered "yes." Again, I found out that it is important to look not just at the way in which a website is designed but also at what people expect when they go to a site.

I also think that people do not really think about what a website is supposed to do. The suffix of a website name (like .com or .edu) is a way of knowing before you even look at the site. A website that ends .com is one that is run by a company. A company is trying to sell a person something. There is nothing wrong with this: It's what companies are supposed to do. But selling something is not the same as educating somebody.

I think (from talking to my parents) that when websites were first being used that people were more aware of what the name of the website meant. But now people do not really pay attention to such things. So when they see a website name they just assume that they will learn something from it. But learning about how much a ticket costs is very different from learning something like how a disease is treated.

The next question (Is there a well-known organization or institution associated with or sponsoring the site?). This is the only question that everyone that I asked answered the same to. Everything single person answered "yes" to this question. This was not surprising to me, although I think that it was interesting that everyone answered "yes" to this question but to the question right before this one there was disagreement. It seems to me that both questions were really asking the same thing but clearly the people that I asked thought that the questions were asking different things.