Role of Technology in Indian Tourism Supply Chain

The association of computers, Internet and e-commerce has grasped the tourism industry to an indispensable extent. The tourism supply chain experience large investments in development of database, electronic media, publicity and web pages. Information and communication technology (ICT) brought sea change in the tourism industry, all over the world. The implications brought the inherent challenges and opportunities for Indian tourism. The use of modern technologies gradually became the competitive advantage and subsequently the strategic option. This paper studies various technology applications in the tourism industry. The study explores technology implications in decision making of various stakeholders in tourism industry at various stages of travel. The discussions in the paper include the preference aspects of tourists driven by the novelty and familiarity dimensions through travel services, destination choices, and the tourism market structure in this paper. The study relies on the website based information as a secondary source and analyzes thereof the ICT penetration in tourism. Result areas indicate the means of communications, the electronic database, the computer applications and information systems meeting the seasonal demands and preferences towards the destinations. The paper also includes some national and international comparisons to lay the directions of diffusion for implementing various technologies in tourism. Overall, the discussions refer to Indian tourism industry, where the authors try to do a technology forecasting and explore the future dimensions of technologies in tourism from the current literature review and research analysis.