ICT and e-business in the tourism industry ICT adoption ... - empirica

Tourism
2 Context and Background
2.1 Sector definition – scope of the study
Tourism is most commonly understood as the provision of services for people travelling to
and staying outside their usual environment for less than one consecutive year for leisure
or for business purposes.
The operational definition of "tourism" for the official statistics record is ambiguous. If one
defines tourism from the consumer’s point of view, all products and services consumed
by tourists should be taken into account. Yet, the standard NACE classification 17 does not
always allow a clear distinction from other sectors: whereas accommodation establishments,
travel agents and tour operators are incontestably an inherent part of the tourism
sector, the question to what extent restaurants, cafes and bars, fair and amusement
parks and transportation should be included cannot be clearly answered.
Official statistics do not allow us to determine whether a guest in a bar is a tourist or a
local person, nor whether a restaurant or a bar is located in a tourist destination, and
therefore most likely mainly be visited by tourists, or not. The role of the transport sector
in the broader tourism economy is obvious, but on the basis of the NACE classification it
cannot be evaluated properly because the extent to which its capacities are used by
tourists and other passengers cannot be distinguished. 18 Thus, the quantitative survey
conducted by e-Business W@tch covers the following sub-sectors of tourism:
Exhibit 2-1: Business activities covered by the tourism sector (NACE Rev. 1.1)
NACE Rev. 1.1
Divisions Groups/
Classes
H 55
I 63
O 92
55.1 Hotels
Hotels and restaurants
Business activities
55.2 Camping sites and other provision of short-stay accommodation
55.3 Restaurants
55.4 Bars
Supporting and auxiliary transport activities; activities of travel agencies
63.3 Activities of travel agencies and tour operators; tourist assistance
activities n.e.c.
Recreational, cultural and sporting activities
92.33 Fair and amusement park activities
92.52 Museums activities and preservation of historical sites and buildings
92.53 Botanical and zoological gardens and nature reserves activities
17
18
NACE Rev. 1.1 is a 4-digit classification of business activities. It is a revision of the ‘General
Industrial Classification of Economic Activities within the European Communities’, known by the
acronym NACE and originally published by Eurostat in 1970.
For an elaborated examination of the difficulties with a definition of the tourism sector, see for
example European Commission, DG Enterprise 2004.
19