“Olympian Innovation” was the overall topic of ENTER 2006, an international conference for Information Technology and Tourism, which took place from January 18-20 in Lausanne/Switzerland., 25.01.2006

The Ecole Hôtelière de Lausanne, one of the world’s leading business schools for tourism, was the venue of this year’s ENTER, the 13th annual conference of IFITT, the International Federation for IT and Travel & Tourism. “When ENTER first started, there was a clear distance between research and development of the new information and communication technologies and their implementation in our industry. Today we are witnessing a real time compression with much shorter development and application cycles and rapid innovation strategies are a natural consequence of this trend, with both research and the industry moving ever faster”, Professor Andrew Frew, the new IFITT President, pointed out. “From almost all presentations it was evident that the tourism industry has not only taken on the technology innovation message but is becoming an eager development partner in really useful consumer-oriented applications”

This time compression was illustrated by an observation from Richard Zwicky, the founder and CEO of Metamend, a Canada based firm whose Search Engine Optimisation software is recognised as the world leader in its field, “In 1993 a few hundred domain names were to be found on the Internet, ten years later it was a few hundred million”. ‘Consumer orientation’ has therefore become the mantra for successful marketing strategies in the tourism industry worldwide. This requires on the one hand more refined user analysis in order to get to know the customers’ needs, and on the other hand website optimisations and “intelligent web”-technologies. New software technologies allow destinations and tourist service suppliers to build virtual communities among small businesses. Experts from Yahoo, expedia, Hitwise, EyeforTravel or IBM presented their strategies for the Travel Search Engine Marketplace. “It’s not the searching – it’s all about finding”, said Juerg Schmid, CEO of Switzerland Tourism, and hereby defined in short the strategy for all E-Commerce suppliers in the travel industry.

The big challenge for the technology providers, which has already been recognised by them, will be the development of simple tools with which the small and medium enterprises in the tourism sector can present themselves to the online marketplace. And last but not least ENTER 2006 put a special focus on the Innovation in Destination Competitiveness with best practise examples from tourist offices all over Europe and the presentation of the new European portal which is the first online strategy of more than 30 European national tourist organisations.

Further information on ENTER 2006 and IFITT is available from the IFITT Secretariat, Tel. +43 512 393989, ifitt@ifitt.org or see www.ifitt.org/enter/