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Among the great advantages of the WWW in the tourism business is that it enables the customer to have much easier direct access to a very large amount of up-to-date information and to do the reservations from home. Unless users have access to Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) on a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA), they have to collect information before departure, or else use 'cybercafes' at their destination. There is great variety in the use of maps on tourist websites - some sites from countries where tourism is a major source of income still make little use of maps, or at the most very simple, static maps. Scanned paper maps, despite their disadvantages, are still widely used. There are signs, however, that more tourist organisations are recognising the usefulness of maps on the Web and particularly their interactive aspects. On a well-developed site, the user can, for example, plan a route, call up symbols on the map for places of interest and accommodation addresses, view related photographs, go to related sites, book travel and accommodation. The typically small map format is a problem that has to be met by panning and zooming techniques. Some tourist map sites make special provision for downloading and printing high quality maps using the PDF format, for example. In the future we can expect more 'virtual reality tours' to be incorporated into tourist websites.

Last updated April 16, 2002