A Tourism Electronic Commerce Platform Based On Web Services

Tourism industry has long been regarded as an industry of great potential. In China, it develops fast with the economic development and improvement of people's living standards in recent 20 years. Tourism industry is different from other industries in many respects. For example, it is an information-intensive industry, and what exists between service providers and consumers is only information communication, and the services provided are usually dispersive geographically; furthermore, it has strong connection with many other industries such as transportation and catering industry. All of these features make it easy to develop e-business in tourism industry. With Internet, travel agencies can provide their customers with more convenient services.Though e-business can provide great benefit for tourism industry, the development of e-business for tourism in China is much disappointing when compared with many developed countries. This paper analyzes the reasons for this situation. It is discovered that many tourism websites are too small to form a scale effect, and most of them put their emphasis on competing in tourism information and prices of the services they provide, but ignore the quality of service.To solve these problems, this paper provides an e-business solution based on Web services and SNS (Social Network Service). Using Web services, the problems of information integration between tourism agencies and e-business portal can be easily solved, while SNS is helpful in building an online community which can improve the quality of service for online users. A SNS-based portal and an e-business platform based on Web services were designed and implemented in this paper. To guarantee the security of the e-business platform, we used a custom SOAP header to pass user credentials to authenticate the user with each Web service request, together with SSL to secure the communication on transport level.