For the third time now, experts in tourism from all over the world come to Innsbruck in order to exchange ideas, inform themselves and others about current developments and build a network of personal relations. The main topics of ENTER 96 are business engineering and standardisation, covering a wide area of subjects like the redesign of touristic products and the processes of their production. This covers, however, not only single business processes but also the entire value chain in tourism, ending up in redesign of distribution channel and changing relations among principals, tour operators, travel agents and customers. Standardisation increasingly becomes a prerequisite for interorganisational coordination and cooperation, EDI is slowly being introduced in tourism and Internet related standards like HTML and VRML. will have a major impact on the future development of electronic distribution platforms for services in tourism. As the proceedings underscore, ENTER has been established as an international platform for scientific and practical discourse on Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism. The close interdisciplinary link between technological and economic questions in tourism opens up new, promising threads for applied research and development likewise.
