Worldwide, vacation cruises on increasingly larger ships have beensteadily growing in popularity. People like the all-inclusive price for food, room, and entertainment, the variety of shipboard activities, and the ability to unpack just once and still visit several different places. The first of the two minicases used throughout this book is the story of Happy Cruise Lines. Happy Cruise Lines has several ships and operates (begins its cruises) from a number of ports. It has a variety of vacation cruise itineraries, each involving several ports of call. The company wants to keep track of both its past and future cruises and of the passengers who sailed on the former and are booked on the latter. Actually, you can think of a cruise line as simply a somewhat specialized instance of any passenger transportation company, including airlines, trains, and buses. Beyond that, a cruise line is, after all, a business and like any other business of any kind it must be concerned about its finances, employees, equipment, and so forth.

 a. Using this introductory description of (and hints about) Happy Cruise Lines, make a list of the things in Happy Cruise Lines' business environment about which you think the company would want to maintain data. Do some or all of these qualify as ''corporate resources?'' Explain.

 b. Develop some ideas about how the data you identified in part a above can be used by Happy Cruise Lines to gain a competitive advantage over other cruise lines.