Internet distribution system architecture and methods

Tourism

Internet Distribution System

An Internet Distribution System is a compilation of online reservation systems and travel portals which focus in internet marketing of travel and related services. There are currently more than 2000 internet reservation systems and travel websites on the Internet. These online systems have unique forces and features that can be utilized to drive probable travelers to a given destination and to a given hotel (Internet Distribution Systems (IDS), 2007).

It has been reported that the online booking in the hospitality industry including hotels and motels, airlines and travel packages is increasing at a very rapid speed recently, particularly at the lower rate end. Online hotel room bookings have gone up six times over from 1999 to 2002. It has been estimated that there will be a more rapid jump in the online hotel room bookings over the next few years (Yang, Flynn & Anderson, n.d.).

With this expansion in hospitality management systems there are definitely some challenges and issues in the appliance of Internet technology to the hospitality industry. One major obstacle is in the area of security. Customers are unquestionably concerned with giving their personal financial information, like their credit card numbers, online, and a lot of old-fashioned consumers are afraid to pay an invoice through Internet. An additional issue with online booking is the quality of delivered service - including both delivery speeds, like short advance time required in ordering and delivery reliability. It is thought that in order for the travel industry to be successful in the long-term, the operations of an online booking business must vie in a more creative way comparing to those traditional business counterparts. This means, the strategic positioning decision of an online booking business must establish its own unique competitive advantages over its traditional business competitors as well as its online business equivalents (Yang, Flynn & Anderson, n.d.).

In order to position a global or national wide hotel reservation system, there is a need for the hotel industry to get IT standardization. At the present time there are more than a few hotel associations that exist, but these organizations do not touch data exchange standard between enterprises. If some agreements on hotel industry standards would be settled, business to business (B2B) system and business to customer (B2C) system in hotel industry would provide both enterprises and consumers more benefits (Xiang, Zhou & Chowdhury, n.d.).

Security is one of the most important and complicated challenges related to this industry. There are many studies that have been done in regards to providing security solutions of integration of heterogeneous computers and resources spread across multiple domains with the intent to provide users services. One of these issues is to keep the contents confidentiality and integrity. The goal is to ensure that no one tampers with or steals the data that is transferred through public networks. Another issue is to control access to web services. Before use web services, end users must pass the authorization procedure. Finally, but not least importantly, protecting the server from malicious attacks is practical and imperative problem because there always no enough security when services opened to the Internet (Xiang, Zhou & Chowdhury, n.d.).