Innovation in tourism based on information technology

The article reviews innovative services based on information technologies (IT) which have been already introduced in business processes of tourist organizations. According to L. Keeley's classification there are ten types of innovations and tourist company shouldn't focus only on its product characteristics but try to perform various types of innovations. The authors deal with three areas of IT implementation and make conclusion that IT can be the key source to create innovations which could rise the quality of offered services and products to the higher level and thus become more competitive in tourism and hospitality. The first IT area is mobile applications that have been used by transport companies, hotels, restaurants and museums. It is shown that mobile applications are efficient tool for innovation development process as it is possible to provide a new channel, feedback with customer, create additional offer. It is likely that mobile applications become an integral part of the IT-infrastructure in any enterprise engaged into tourism. The second IT area is geoinformation systems (GIS). In particular, various tourist tasks can be solved by means of GIS. For example, “Personal Guide for the Curonian Spit” employs GIS combined with photo and audio files and shows tourist itineraries via signals from GLONASS and GPS. The third IT area is improvement of web-based booking system in different tourist sectors. The systems acquire new functions that facilitate booking process. One of the trends of improvement is 3D visualization of the objects (hotel rooms, restaurant tables) to provide maximum data for potential customer.