Tourism in the New Econmy 1 Tourism in the New Economy

Globalisation and the development of the information and telecommunications tech-nologies are creating new rules governing competition: we are witnessing the begin-ning of a Net Economy. Newly configured customer/performance systems are lead-ing to the transformation of industries and companies. The borderlines between the industries within tourism are dissolving, and the scope of companies ’ activities is changing. New forms of cooperation are required. Often, the value added by the core business is no longer sufficient, and there is a demand for new commercialisation models. The coercion to achieve growth, which is driven by the capital market and the constantly increasing critical corporate sizes, requires new entrepreneurial dy-namism. As a consequence, conventional corporate models of destinations, hotels and funiculars in traditional tourism countries often generate negative results. This paper seeks to demonstrate how the transformation driver, IT, may also make a contribution towards shaping the transformation process in an entrepreneurial man-ner and, in doing so, arrive at a comparatively higher level of competitiveness. New performance systems are outlined, and value drivers identified, on the basis of a pro-cess model which, in turn, is based on the evolving net economy. A special focus is aimed at the examples of marketing and the establishment of customer contacts