The tourism marketplace is a global arena where millions of buyers (travel agents and the consumers) and sellers (hotel accommodations, airline operators, car rentals, tour operators, etc.) work together to exchange travel services. According to preliminary findings presented by the World Tourism Organization (WTO) in January 2007, international tourist arrivals reached an all-time record of 842 million in 2006--an increase of 4.5 percent over 2005. Singapore's Tourism industry has seen a growth of 9% in visitor's arrival in 2006 when compared to 2005. One of the major contributions has been made by online bookings using the Internet. GDS stands for Global Distribution Systems; which are the backbone of major hotel and travel industry's network for web-based bookings. This complex distribution of network is divided among major suppliers and intermediaries. With the help of GDS, buyers and sellers are allowed to make their reservations quickly. This growth in the tourism industry would not have occurred without the GDS infrastructure.
GDS was first introduced by the airline industry in 1960; and today the same technology is being widely used in the entire tourism industry consisting of hotels, automobiles, airline etc which gives the ability to track booking schedules, availability, prices, etc. to store and to retrieve information and conduct transactions related to travel. GDS is also known as the Central Reservation Systems in the hotel industry (CRS). This legacy (global distribution systems) provides today's backbone to the Internet travel/hotel distribution system. In this report we will look into the role of IT to enhance these distribution systems (GDS/CRS) in the hospitality sector - a niche market of the tourism industry, also to further look into new distribution alternatives that are available today.
This study has been conducted as a knowledge base study and a quantitative survey with thirty respondents from the hospitality industry who specialise in the distribution systems to understand the existing system and the challenges with the future forecast factors of newer systems.