Itchy Feet

Abstract

In this chapter the authors describe an e-tourism environment that places emphasis on a community driven approach to foster a lively society of travelers. It enables them to exchange travel experiences, recommend tourism destinations or just catch some interesting gossip. Moreover, business transactions such as booking a trip or getting assistance from professional travel agents are a constituent part of this environment. All these interactions happen in an integrated, game-like, 3D virtual world where each tourist is impersonated as an avatar. The authors draw a retrospective on the specification, design and implementation of this e-tourism environment and present the status quo. The authors describe how they applied electronic institutions, a framework developed and employed in the area of multi-agent systems, to the tourism domain. Furthermore, they present their approach to connect a 3D virtual world with electronic institutions. Our goal is to provide a test bed for assessing the acceptance of virtual environments, as a medium to overcome the non-tangible nature of tourism products.