Value-Added Services and Decision Support Through Web Services Brokering: A Case Study on E-Travel Insurance Quotation

With the maturing of Web services, businesses can effectively provide value-added services to one another through a program-to-program interface. Not only can this expand business opportunities, but also it helps provide convenient services to customers. In addition, a service brokering system can effectively achieve this, providing match-and-rank decision support to customers. Motivated by our earlier study on the complexity of integrated tourist services, we present an e-travel insurance quotation system (ETQS) in this paper. The ETQS offers travel insurance premium quotations as a value-added service to online air ticket sales. We illustrate the applicability of our approach, together with some details of the processes integration through Web services.