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D13 OnTour: ESPRIT Project No. 26956A2 Offer productAfter the product conditions are fixed, the product has to be offered to the potential customers.The task A2 “offer product” comprises all activities concerning the marketing ofthe tourist services and outputs product information material as well as service offers.The task is controlled by the product conditions, the company strategy as well as the reservationand cancellation information generated in the subsequent processes. The latter informationis important in order to make the decision whether to push, reduce or stop themarketing activities.Computerised task processingInstead (or at least in addition) of producing twice a year printed catalogues and brochuresthe OnTour industrial partners have commonly stated the need for an electronic, i.e.WWW-based, marketing channel. The expected improvements of presenting the serviceinformation in the Internet concerns the actuality, availability and distribution of the productoffers as well as the possibility of attract direct customers. However, not all SMEs areable to establish an own WWW-Server, because of the costs (equipment, maintenance,etc.) and the needed know-how. Therefore, an open mediation or broker service is required.The system has to support the sellers easily to enter, update and distribute his informationrespectively offers.Functions for promoting special offers as well as transparent and standardised servicecodes have been also named as requirements regarding a computerised system from theindustrial partners.OnTourThe OnTour server represents the open platform to distribute product information materialin the WWW. The OnTour system will provide standard forms (templates) for each offertype to capture the relevant data (price, conditions, (sub-)services, deadlines, seller, destination,suppliers, link to background information like photos, Web camera, homepage ofsupplier etc.) for the product offers. This should ensure that comparable and consistentinformation are captured able to apply function for comparing and combining data withoutthe need of a "cryptic" service codes.Regarding the service codes it has to be stated that OnTour is not in the position to define akind of standard for tourist service codes. The different specific codes are currently definedby a few tour operators representing the “key-players” on the tourist market. Thus, OnTourcan currently only evaluate, if a „work-around“ for the handling of different codes (e.g.mapping function/tables) can be integrated into the system and consider European effortsaddressing this problem (e.g. the European Committee for Standardisation CEN/TC 329„Tourism Services“).By using profiles the seller will be supported by entering standard information. Via the"seller client" of OnTour, the seller will be able to update or modify his offers, e.g. becausethe product is sold through a different marketing channel or the price has to be reduced.For promoting special offers OnTour plans to offer a kind of auction function on theserver. The seller can mark the offer and has to define a minimum price as well as a dead-7 June 1999 D13V04S3 Page 33