Wacharapong Yawai, managing director of Max Saving (Thailand), said the Thai tourism industry is moving towards a new era of electronic tourism. Technology will play a key role to enhance the competitiveness of operators.

eCombot is the core engine of tourism software to help small and medium tourism businesses more easily develop their online market channels.

The concept is to provide engine software to develop electronic tourism systems across 12 modules including accommodation, tours, travel activity, air tickets, buses and trains, car rental, entertainment, restaurants, back office, chain and network software, travel portal sites, and electronic shopping software.

Currently, there are only four modules available, including accommodation, tours, the travel portal site, and electronic shopping.

"Tourism, worth about Bt80 billion a year, is the biggest portion of e-commerce in the country. Eighty per cent of all e-commerce transactions are from the tourism industry," said Wacharapong.

To utilise the benefits of eCombot software, tourism businesses have to register at eCombotTravel.com to set up their online storefront. Once they put information into the template provided, all information is automatically generated and displayed as a storefront at the electronic marketplace for tourism: Tourismmart.com.

Around 10,000 companies have benefited from eCombot Travel. They have opened an online market at Tourismmart.com, and have generated total online transactions worth Bt10 million.

The company offers electronic tourism tools and the electronic marketplace free of change. However, it gains revenue from a 5 to 10-per-cent commission from each transaction, said Wacharapong.

In the future, it aims to enhance eCombotTravel.com to encourage local tourism companies to develop a tourism exchange network so they can collaborate with other tourism businesses globally. Thus, they need to provide facilities such as a three-dimensional digital map, as well as machine translation (MT) to help tourists around the world access local tourism services.

"Electronic tourism is not only about doing C2C tourism transactions, it also means B2B transactions as well. In the next five years, we aim to develop an entire Thai tourism exchange network," said Wacharapong.

The adoption of technology in tourism businesses will not only increase business performance and competitiveness, but also reduce the cost of operation by 30 to 50 per cent.

"Thai tourism is now in the second stage of the electronic-tourism era, expanding from just having a website and online services, but it still lacks collaboration. We need to speed up our local tourism businesses to catch up with the trend, and eventually need to jump to the final state of electronic tourism, a complete Thai electronic tourism exchange network," said Wacharapong.

Asina Pornwasin

The Nation