Design And Implementation Of A New Tourism System Architecture Based On Channel Management

In today's tourism market, the information channels which based on GDS support the whole system of this industry, the majority of tourism products and services are published and delivered through these channels. However, in the framework of the current tourism system, the channels are too clumsy to use, not only for its lack of unified management, but also for the interaction between the channels and the management of internal information. Tourism services providers often have to face the situation of all sorts of sales channels, establishing a connection with them always encounter the following questions:1. Due to the different ways of realization, corresponding to different channels often requires different techniques to connect. For those tourism services providers who are lack of related knowledge, this process is very cumbersome.2. In order to use the functions provided by the channels, services providers often need the help of label provider, Switches Company, and other intermediate agencies, this requires a considerable portion of capital spending.3. All the channels cannot be centrally managed, which resulted in redundancy, repetitive action and other issues.4. Cannot support the cross-sectoral cooperation within the tourism industry. To a certain extent, this hindered the development of the tourism product sales. By analyzing the defects of the original framework, basing on the combination of Web services, OTA data standard and other techniques, this article introduces a new channel management-based tourism system architecture--CMTSA. It solves the communication problems between the various subsystems within the tourism industry effectively, and makes the system based on the framework to achieve a more rapid and efficient way for development and deployment. In addition CMTSA's biggest advantage is the ability that supports the channel management, which not only reduces the cost of travel service providers'work, and also link up the entire tourism system. CMTSA's innovation mainly in the following three aspects:1. The introduction of OTA data standard. OTA is a set of data rules which can describe almost all tourism-related information and business processes; it is a good solution for the semantic differences between various participants within the tourism industry.2. The adoption of web services technology. The components of the existing framework have many differences in working platform; programming language and functional interface, so it is not conducive for them work together. The characteristics of web services can effectively solve these problems.3. The construction of channel management system. The channel management system is a platform designed for the travel services providers, it provides a user access interface by which the tourism services providers can perform:maintaining the connection of each channel; conducting business event management; integrating the operation of all the decentralized systems. The channel management system makes the whole tourism industry system running more compactly and efficiently.The proposed channel management-based tourism system architecture has been applied in real projects. I participated in the project of ItalyHotels, in its development process CMTSA also reflected its advantages, not only reducing a lot of working costs, but also opening up the road for the future business expansion.All in all, channel management will inevitably occupy the central position of the tourism industry system in the future, it will become an important and complex research topic, the existing system framework of the tourism industry still have significant room for the improvement and optimization. In particular, the majority of current systems in the tourism industry are still in the "Each fights his own battle" state. GDS and other distribution channels' application are not widespread, also the OTA standards and web services' application and research in tourism industry is still in the initial stage. The CMTSA proposed in this paper can be seen as a breakthrough in this field.