Case Study on "Disneyland How Is ICT Applied"

Case Study 15 pages (4244 words) Sources: 20 Style: Harvard

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Disneyland

How is ICT Applied to the Tourism and Hospitality Industries?

Nearly every industry in today's economy uses ICT to some extent. This paper examines the specific ways in which the tourism and hospitality use information and communication technology (often abbreviated to ICT) as key aspects of their overall business strategy. While originally the term generally referred to the technology (that is, the hardware) involved, the term now includes a broader range of hardware, software, and business organization.

The term ICT now often refers to an overall business strategy that emphasizes the importance of an overall strategy that emphasizes the importance of an integrated communications system throughout the entire business. Again, this refers both to the physical integration of computers, software, phone systems or wireless systems, back-up systems, etc. The other key aspect of integrated ICT systems is the emphasis on an integrated message in both internal and external communications. This means that corporate communications directed at employees should be in line with communications aimed at both stockholders and customers.

Such an integrated strategy is especially important in an industry in which there are a number of different offices that are widely spread in geographic terms, a condition that is often true for both the hospitality and tourist industries. Before examining a specific website to determine the quality of its ITC program and how integrated its message is, I will provide a very brief definition of what is included in the tourism and hospitality industries. What is referred to by these economic sectors might seem obvious, but they comprise more different sub-categories than most people realize.

The hospitality industry (or sector) is generally agreed on to include a range of fields that are themselves part of the much larger service industry. Specific to this sector are restaurants, hotels and motels, adventure and theme parks (such as Disneyland), cruises and train tours (as opposed to trains used purely for transportation), all of the requirements for supplying and staffing each of these types of businesses, casinos and other gambling arenas, the varieties of planning that are required to make all of these types of businesses run smoothly, and transportation as it is associated with traveling to any of these sites,

The hospitality industry requires in almost all cases a certain level of leisure and income that is not required for subsistence. (Exceptions could include such activities as staying in a hotel while a member of the family is in a nearby hospital, etc.). Because of this, the industry is centered in wealthier countries in terms of where the businesses themselves are located, even though many of the destinations are in developing countries.

The complexity of the hospitality industry is only suggested at by the above description since each of these loci include a wide range of different professions, each requiring very different skills. Chefs, concierges who speak several languages, florists, landscape designers, and janitors must all perform their jobs well if the hospitality location is to succeed.

The complexity of the human resources challenges as well as the day-to-day challenges required in managing one of these businesses would hardly be possible without a highly effective and well-integrated IT system.

Even more than the hospitality industry, the tourism industry is important to national economies, especially for some nations, which depend strenuously on the foreign currencies that tourists bring to their countries. Tourism is probably most often thought of as travel for pleasure and recreation. This is certainly an important part of what tourism is; however, when official statistics are provided these statistics almost always include travel for businesses purposes. This addition makes sense if one remembers that business travelers often participate in more obvious tourist activities (such as visiting museums and eating at restaurants) when they are traveling.

Of course, not all travelers are tourists. The idea of tourism includes the concepts of traveling to a place that one does not usually go and with which one is not intimately familiar. It also comprises the idea of a relatively short period of time: In this way it is distinguished from immigration.

One of the most obvious ways in which to assess the communication strategies and effectiveness of a company is the quality of its website. The remainder of this paper examines a specific website and then moves on more generally to discuss the criteria by which websites (and a company's degree of efficient and integrated communication strategies) may be assessed.

Disneyland's Electronic Front Gate

Anyone who has ever visited one of the Disney parks understands that the company is dedicated to making a good first impression: Walking into the park and down Main Street whisks one quickly (indeed essentially immediately) into a world of make-believe, a psychological journey emphasized by the appearance of Sleeping Beauty's castle rising up before one.

In contrast to the carefully orchestrated visual mapping of the actual Disney parks, the website for the main park (http://disneyland.disney.go.com/) is far less visually appealing. The designers of the site seem to have forgotten that on the internet less is indeed more. Even when a great deal of information must be conveyed to the user of the site, the homepage should never be so cluttered that it has the effect of intimidating the user. Web evaluation must always include how relatively easy it is for the average user to find what s/he is most likely to need on the site as well as how appealing the site is in emotional, psychological, and aesthetic terms.

The Disneyland site has a significant advantage over other similarly designed sites. The fact that it is visually not compelling is not likely to discourage most people from visiting Disneyland in the way that a similarly uncompelling site for a small business might indeed turn a viewer away and cost the company a sale. However, a site such as the one being examined here might well prompt a user to call the park instead of using the online resources, a strategy that is more costly for the company.

ICT and Web Evaluation Literature Review

The introductory section of this paper touched briefly on some of the criteria by which ITC and websites can be assessed. Each company as well as each industry has specific needs and so each also has specific requirements for its communication systems. However, there are a number of criteria that are generally considered to be highly important and possibly even indispensible. One of these criteria is that the communication system is sufficiently integrated that users of the system are not required to jury-rig connections between different parts of the system.

Businesses have needed to become ever-more efficient in our globalized economy, especially as the current recession has proven to be so resistant to interventionary attempts. A company without a communication strategy that links internal processes to key marketing concepts and goals will most certainly not succeed.

This is true even for such a quasi-monopolistic (and certainly culturally hegemonic) corporation as Disney. But an efficient and integrated ITC system is essential not only for improving the marketing aspects of a company. It is also essential for making the company a welcoming place to work.

Given the demands placed on individuals in the hospitality and tourism industries (in which so many employees are faced daily with often difficult-to-deal-with members of the public), having employees who are happy with their work situations is no small aspect of a well-run corporation. A major part of the way in which employees can stay connected to a corporation's overall mission so that they can provide daily services to reinforce that mission is the ways in which they are connected to each other through computers, that is, through the company's ITC system.

Such electronic connections are important to any company; however, they are especially important to large corporations that (like Disney) have locations in many countries. The mobility of a company's services and/or products in today's world requires a communication system that supports easy communication not just from one cubicle to another but also from one continent to another.

The above comments are focused on the key importance of a company's communication strategy. Such a strategy consists of a number of different types of hardware, and of course if such hardware fails then the system itself will collapse, albeit temporarily. More important to a corporation's overall successful ITC program is the intellectual and organizational rationale for the way that the company has of conducting its business the way it does. Disney is a key example of an American company that has been able to expand significantly while making relatively few accommodations to other countries, or at least relatively few significant ones.

Assessing the effectiveness of a company's marketing as evidenced through its web presence requires two separate steps. The first is the one that has been being discussed above: The success of a marketing strategy can never be addressed in absolute terms but most be considered in the context of how it meshes with current market conditions and demands.

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