Abstract:
Travel and tourism is now generally perceived to be the market with the biggest online potential, as travel sites
prove among the most popular on the World Wide Web (WWW).Tourism is an information intensive industry that
deals in intangible products. The intangibility of the tourism product is compensated for by the production of large
amounts of information, thus travel and tourism marketing lends itself to the application of information technology.The
WWW provides an unprecedented opportunity for small special interest tourism firms to gain access to international
markets at relatively low cost. The full potential of the medium is not yet, however, utilised by most operators. This
paper examines the role of information diffusion in small/medium tourism operations and discusses methods of
increasing the penetration of an online presence. A case study of small/medium special interest tourism operator is
presented to demonstrate the type of marketing and market research possible using the Internet as a medium.
