Introduction and Justification of the Approach

    As stated before, the project will provide an electronic environment to market alternative tourism by the collaboration of the parties in the tourism sector in the Mediterranean region. The work plan proposed is designed to ensure the maximum participation of all parties involved and the project will evolve through the workshops held regularly after every milestone of the project.

    The alternative tourism is the increasing trend in the Mediterranean region as the interest for the classical means decline drastically. The objective of the travel agencies is merely to make profit out of tourism and their objective converges to the goal of the project as the will be yearning for catching the trend in their sector. The electronic commerce has become widespread in the last decade and the first to enter this market in its sector has the ultimate advantage. This project offers the travel agencies gain a competitive edge over both the traditional agencies and the web based agencies which are scattered in a small region of their own because the project spans the whole Mediterranean region.

    The general work flow of the project initiates with the identification of the potential markets and travel agencies. This stage of the project will help the project team to acquire a deep knowledge about the sector and the university will be in assistance of the team during this phase. The potential partners will be identified and will be contacted as soon as possible. The challenges, problems and nature of the sector may only be fully understood with the experiences of all the stakeholdes of the tourism sector. This is done via workshops. The multinational nature of the project will expose the partners to the ambiguities in law and governmental affairs, hence these issues will be resolved and the project will be in search of government support from the participating countries. This will conclude the efforts to understand the environment and then the products may be clearly defined. The technical part of the job is straightforward after the lenghty preparation period. However there are crucial points in the technical part of the project. The secure money transactions on the internet, the user friendliness of the end user interface will have a paramount importance. The marketing activities for the pilot areas will be launched one month before the pilot run of project. The choice of the pilot area will represent the entire Mediterrannean region and therefore will provide us with invaluable results of the overall system performance. The results are evaluated in a workshop and the products are finalized. This phase will ready the system for final implementation.

    A number of issues should be discussed about the project. In terms of technical feasiblity, the web technology and transaction security on the internet are readily available and they are in wide use. The number of netizens are in a phase of logarithmic increase and the business of the future will depend on the internet and related technologies. However, initially persuading people to buy holidays on the internet may not be easy. Marketing the products by both the classical and the internet based means will help to overcome the problem.

    Another issue is the hard challenge of coordinating the parties of the sector, i.e. agencies, carriers, port authorities etc. The benefits gained by the parties will be fairly distributed. The workshops and the participation encouraging environment of the project will resolve such issues. The scope and the nature of the platform will attract many participants.