Data Security in Travel Trade - Essay Example

Data Security in Travel Trade Problem ment: As incidents of data corruption are dynamically increasing, data security for travelers has become amatter of great concern for tourism departments of different nations. Digitization has proved to be highly beneficial in the context of modern times, especially in case of data protection and maintenance. This process has further been facilitated by the invention of several types of portable data storage devices, such as, laptops, digital notebooks, removable drives, mobile phones, etc. However, it has been observed that such portable devices are misplaced, lost or stolen, while the owner is traveling. Naturally, data stored in such devices becomes subjects of misappropriation or corruption. This puts personal security of that person at risk. The confidential information regarding his profession is also exposed. Though several technological steps have already been taken to track the lost device but future can only say how far such technological adoptions have been effective. Challenge/Opportunity: The domain of data security mainly focuses over protection of data both at the personal and professional arena. On one hand the information technology boom has contributed in a great way by helping an individual receive access to the required data, but there is also a high chance that utilization of such information will happen in a wrong manner. Both for law makers as well as administrators, it is becoming increasingly tough to put a stop over the ongoing process of data exploitation. While reflecting over the pervasiveness of such breach of data security, American Bar Association has reflected, “Every week brings another headline decrying the latest large scale data compromise. Payment card accounts, social security numbers, and even medical records, all are fundamental building blocks used by malicious hackers to facilitate identity and financial fraud.” (American Bar Association, 2008, p.1) However, as the modern organizations have become conscious about incidents of such unwanted intrusions in their database, those also have come up with different defense mechanisms. Though such steps have not been able to stop the incidents of data exploitation entirely, they have made the task a lot tougher for the hackers. Execution of such task becomes easy for them if they avail access to the confidential information through such lost or stolen devices while a person is traveling. Thus, the travel tourism industry is facing one of the major challenges regarding security of a traveler in the way of facilitating data security. Challenges: The greatest barriers before tourism industry to provide complete data security to the travelers are the casual approach towards protecting their personal information and lack of enough care about belongings. Wendy M. Grossman observes, “Talk to people about sensitive data and theyll think first of their medical records, then maybe their email inboxes or telephone calls.” (Grossman, 26th June, 2009) People are still not much careful about preservation of their private data stored in portable devices. They actually do not think that loss of such data can both personally and professionally push themselves at the condition of great harm. Apart from such data they also need to be very careful about exposure of their travel related data because disclosure of such information can lead them to the condition of being harmed personally, “…travel data is exceptionally intimate, more so than most people realise when they open frequent flyer accounts or watch an immigration official slide their passport through a reader. Travel data can expose your religion (special airline meals), your friends and lovers (itineraries, hotel records, seat selections), your medical conditions, and, for businesses, commercially sensitive interactions.” (Grossman, 26th June, 2009) Thus, making people aware about protection of their personal data as well as the data they are carrying along with them in any kind of portable device is the primary challenge for the tourism industry. Criminals/terrorist can easily use such data for vicious acts like identity theft and can create a great threat for the national security. Professional information is always at a high risk of being exploited by competing organizations so that those can receive an upper hand over the targeted organization. Information regarding process of tourism planning is another important challenge the tourism industry often encounters. Like all other business sectors, every tourism organization has certain strategic approaches of its own. Such planning mostly depends on the kind of information that a tourism organization avails from the current market scenario. Unfortunately, there is no such authentic source from where such information can be availed. Rather there has been so much of misappropriation regarding the actual source that the organizations related to this business are often misguided. The recognized companies survive because of their goodwill in the market but medium and small ventures remain the worst sufferers. Graham Miller and Louise Twining-Ward, in this context have observed, “It is valuable to integrate sustainable tourism indicator monitoring with other regular cycles of information collection in the business or community. This will help create efficiencies within the organization and enable the indicators to become integral rather than extra parts of the tourism planning process.” (Miller, Twining-Ward, 2005, 155) Despite in the Ottawa Conference (1991) tourism departments of several nations have reached a mutual agreement that they would try their level best to gather “credible and consistent data” (Wahab and Pigram, 1997, 149), but it seems that the current industry situation regarding data collection is far from achieving its goal. Another challenge that the Internet based travel tourism industry often encounters is proper measurement of the ROI or Return of Investment. Hollis Thomases observes, “…prospective travelers tend to begin their online research significantly far in advance of when they actually book their travel. For online travel advertisers, this could mean nearly a month before true conversion rates and ROI can be measured.” (Thomases, 17th September, 2005) The 2002 report of the Nielsen-Netratings has clearly laid down that “the travel category was the fourth largest web advertiser in May 2002, with 5.4 billion purchased impressions, and eMarketer reported that 32 percent of U.S. travelers have used the Internet to book travel arrangements during 2002.” (Thomases, 17th September, 2005) Such abundance of advertisements often creates a major problem in measuring the true amount of ROI. The only way to solve the problem is to track the advertisement campaigns “beyond their initial delivery”; otherwise such “delayed impact can significantly distort ROI measurement.” (Thomases, 17th September, 2005) According to the opinion of Paul Serff, President and CEO of TIA Foundation, “Return on investment—or ROI — is considered one of the standard methods of measuring the worth of a project. Whether you use ROI, equity, assets or any other formula, its validity still relies on the accuracy of information you include in the equation and the values you put on the different types of return.” (Serff, 2007, 15) As the ROI is not properly measured most of the time, there is always a high risk that there will not be any proper estimation of expenditure done on different sectors of travel and tourism. In case of Internet based travel and tourism business, proper estimation of ROI is very important so that owner of a business can keep a track with his investment and how much return he is getting over such investment. Otherwise there is always a high probability that investment would exceed profit and that will finally cause loss to the organization. Incidents of such type are becoming increasingly common in today’s travel tourism business sector. Due to the lack of management of data security, proper measurement of ROI has not been possible. Automatically, the travel trade organizations estimate their expenditures and returns depending on the wrong estimation and encounter financial damage. Under such circumstances also the recognized organizations survive due to their strong financial foundation but small and mediocre ventures suffer the most. Providing proper monetary security to the customers is another major challenge that the tourism organizations are facing these days. Today monetary transaction is done mostly through different types of payment cards that contain confidential information about the customer’s bank account. To provide further protection to the travelers, “new regulations, such as Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS), were being enacted…” Such initiatives have also led the travel industry security providers have a close watch over the existing forms of security practices. Encryption of the existing security systems needs to be verified. Such arguments have strongly been introduced by most of the tourism organization security controllers. In this context observation of Chris Mauer, the director of security and management of TRX can be cited, “We had confidential data sitting in some of our databases that needed to be encrypted.” (DarkReading, 6th October, 2008) Opportunities: Tourism sector, being an unconventional business domain, encompasses such a large number of customers across the globe that it is really tough for the network security personnel to provide completely full proof data security to the travelers. However, due to novel technological innovations it is not at all tough to make the situation better for travelers even if full protection of their personal data cannot be ensured. All that is needed is mutual collaboration of the travel organizations across the globe to unanimously approve such proposals and remain faithful to their duties in case of private data protection and management. Compared to last few years, the modern travelers are now far more conscious about protection of their personal belonging as well as their private data. Thus, they always prefer to avail services of those organizations only that can provide them with best protection in this regard. Such desire of customers is itself a great opportunity for tourism organizations because if an organization is capable of providing such protection to its clients, they not only will receive a better customer base but also their market reputation will increase. In case of traveling associated with corporates provision of data security service becomes more important - “According to research by Trend Micro data leaks have become a top source of headaches for UK, US, German, and Japanese companies; and it’s not just publicized breaches like the mislaid HMRC CDs, or the lost MoD laptop last January that are fanning the flames of concern.” (Hayes, 6th September, 2008) If proper protection to such lost devices can be provided by a travel organization, automatically it will become a subject of trust for business travelers. According to the estimation of the Jupiter Media Matrix “…the US online managed corporate travel bookings will grow from $12 billion in 2002 to $32.8 billion in 2005.” (Starkov and Price, 2nd march, 2003) This information clearly shows that if such security services can be provided to the corporate travelers then the tourism organizations can receive huge amount of profit from such customer base. In order to provide better protection to personal data of travelers across the globe different types of encryption systems, security applications like TravelTrax, (DarkReading, 6th October, 2008) and EV SSL (Edwards, 9th July, 2009) have been invented. It is encouraging to witness that government of different nations are also encouraging the travel trade organizations not only to implement these systems but also to come up with newer innovations with further experimentations. Thus, the travel trade organizations have enough opportunity to rejuvenate their existing security system and ensure better protection to the personal data of their clients. Management Solutions: Management systems of every travel and tourism organization are required to take special care in case of catering the best service to the customers in case of data security. There must be a separate department in every organization of this nature so that it can provide suggestion to the organization regarding how efficiently the task of data security and management can be conducted. The same department will also be assigned with the responsibility to come up with new ideas and experiments so that the organization can advance further and ensure the aspect of data security of customers. Lessons Learned/ Business Care: Pondering over the existing situation it is clearly understood that there is ample opportunity for a travel trade organization to enhance the scope of its services to the clients. Not only from the perspective of responsibility to their clients but also to enhance the scope of their business further, the travel trade organizations must provide extra attention to the aspect of data security. In this highly competitive edge of tourism business, more a business organization pays attention to aspect further it will be able to gain the trust of the customers, factor on which a business largely depends. Why I care? Personally when I ponder over the matter of data security in travel trade, I feel that misappropriation of data not only causes great harm in the professional scenario but also in one’s personal life. Everyone in this society has complete right to protect his/her information both from professional and personal perspective. However, malicious mentality of certain people always restricts us from enjoying such rights. Thus, there must be immediate steps taken to prevent such acts of exploitation. On the other hand, concentrating more on data security system means that travel trade organizations will be able to protect information of the common people further. Naturally, more number of people will feel free to travel and consequently it will also add to the overall benefit of the nation’s economy. References 1. American Bar Association, (2008), Data security handbook, Chicago: American Bar Association 2. DarkReading, “New System Helps TRX Get Its Encryption Together”, (6th October, 2008) available at: http://www.darkreading.com/security/perimeter/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=211201255, accessed on: 30th September, 2009 3. Edwards, K., (9th July, 2009), “Online travel takes off with EV SSL security”, available at: http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/090709-online-travel-takes-off-with.html, accessed on: 30th September, 2009 4. Grossman, W.M., (26th June, 2009), “Fasten your seatbelts: Information security and the travel industry”, available at: http://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/view/2347/fasten-your-seatbelts-information-security-and-the-travel-industry-/, accessed on: 30th September, 2009 5. Hayes, J., (6th September, 2008), “IT security: have data? Will travel”, available at: http://kn.theiet.org/magazine/issues/0815/data-0815.cfm, accessed on: 30th September, 2009 6. Pigram, J.J.J., and Wahab, S., (1997), Tourism, development and growth: the challenge of sustainability, London: Routledge 7. Price, J., Starkov, M., (2nd March, 2003), “New Challenges in Online Business Travel”, Published on: 22nd September, 2009, available at: http://www.hotelmarketing.com/index.php/content/article/new_challenges_in_online_business_travel/, accessed on: 30th September, 2009 8. Serff, P., (2007), “Measuring Travel and Tourism’s Return on Investment”, Reprinted from "Tourism Works for America, Travel Industry Snapshots 2007", available at: http://www.tia.org/resources/PDFs/PowerofTravel/ROI_Iceberg_Article_2007.pdf, accessed on: 30th September, 2009 9. Thomases, H., (17th September, 2005), “Travel, Tourism & Hospitality – The Challenges of Online Marketing, Tracking, & Measuring ROI”, available at: http://www.webadvantage.net/webadblog/travel-tourism-hospitality-the-challenges-of-online-marketing-tracking-measuring-roi-566, accessed on: 30th September, 2009 10. Twining-Ward, L., and Miller, G., (2005), Monitoring for a sustainable tourism transition: the challenge of developing and using indicators, Oxfordshire: CABI Read More