The Role and Importance of Tourism Information System in Urban

Chapter 58

The Role and Importance of Tourism Information System in Urban

Tourism Planning

Sultan Sevinç KURT, Banu Çiçek KURDOĞLU

INTRODUCTION

The Concept of Tourism: Tourism is the trips performed to rest, enjoy, sightsee and get to know or all these economic and cultural works for attracting tourists to a region. Owing to tourism, people can take a different approach to life by realizing both the beauties of other countries and outside of the region where they live in their countries and cultural heritage left by the people living in the past, and by believing in the necessity of handing down a more livable world to the future generations. Tourism is a fast-growing sector in parallel with increasing prosperity in the world. People have started to direct the added values produced by them in business life to recreational activities. As a recreational activity,

tourism has come to a significant point (Turizm, 2015; World Tourism, 2015).

Tourism is the relations and events consisting of travels and accommodations outside of where people live and work permanently, without the purpose of ensuring permanent settlement and income (Hunzieker & Kraph, 1942). The tourists traveling from one country to the other and doing various spending in that countries contribute to the national income and balance of payments by the employment increase (Dinçer, 1993). Since tourism is a fast-growing sector, the economic effect of tourism is much more than its social, political and environmental effects (Ashworth & Page, 2011).

Recently it has been observed that the tourism tendency of people has turned from the triplet of sea-sand-sun (3S) towards the triplet of entertainment-education-environment (3E). This tendency reveals the necessity for countries to review their tourism activities (OKA, 2015).

Domestic tourism is used for the tourists coming within the country. In domestic tourism, the members of the society with the common culture, history, and archeological wealth as a nation ensure social, cultural and economic gain by participating in it. International tourism is a mutual social, cultural and economic intervention made by the people from different cultures in tourism regions of different countries by crossing the national borders with various purposes. One-day tourism consists of traveling, shopping and social communication activities that people make within the same day for recreation, resting, entertainment and knowledge acquisition purposes without accommodation. In this tourism

type, time and distance are the most important determinants (OKA, 2015; Turizm, 2015). Furthermore, city tourism consists of tourism activities provided to the visitors in urban areas (Tourism Dictionary, 2016). Within city tourism, vacation is short-term visits to cities due to the reasons such as getting

historical and cultural information, watching sports competitions, following art activities and benefiting from shopping opportunities (Emekli, 2013). Since the economic level of people increases and since they like to try different tastes and do shopping and the attraction of the sea-sand-sun tourism seriously

decreases, the interest in city tourism increases (European Commission, 2000).

Sustainable tourism aims to minimize cultural and environmental damages, optimize visitor satisfaction and maximize long-term economic growth for a region (Lane, 1994). Managers and planners in cities need to come up with a natural-cultural-environment friendly approach trying to understand not only the numerical demand aspect of tourism but also the behaviors and expectations of

local people and tourists, in order to ensure sustainability in tourism. For this purpose, managers and planners need to assess these new mentality changes in the first place, determine the potential of natural and cultural environment, reveal the relation between activities and touristic activities and set out a

sustainable understanding of tourism with a balance of protection and use by understanding how local

people and tourists use various opportunities in the urban environment (Kerimoğlu & Çıracı, 2006; Enlil

et al., 2011; Altanlar & Akıncı Kesim, 2011). The main purpose of sustainable tourism planning is to

successfully present touristic demand enabling tourists to go home satisfied with good memories and

without harming the natural and cultural environment. It is important to determine the appropriate routes

that are to create this demand (Gülbay, 2007).

How to manage the increasing tourist number in cities credibly and sustainably, how city tourism

will increase the life quality of local people, what to do to develop a more sustainable, accessible city,

how to measure the effects of tourism on urban economy and how to decrease its negative effects on the

environment are the questions that the urban manager should answer (World Tourism, 2015).

By the nature of the tourism product, consumers want to obtain product information before product

itself. This knowledge acquisition becomes important as tourism regions and tourism establishments

active in these regions and consumers are geographically distant from one another. Consumers have to

buy tourism products that they do not see and do not have any chance to try, by recognizing them in the

light of the information provided to them. Such a feature makes it necessary to fulfill a correct, fast,

credible and cheap information exchange that is to form a common and comprehensive information

network between tourism establishments active in tourism regions producing and presenting tourism

service and consumers (Sarı & Kozak, 2005). Effective storing and managing comprehensive

information on tourism are possible with special purpose information systems.

Basically, tourism is a spatial phenomenon consisting of accommodation, destination and people

traveling from one place to another. However, application number in tourism planning is not as great as

in other fields of technology, in spite of ensuring the necessary infrastructure of GIS (Farsari &

Prastacos, 2004). The lack of GIS applications in tourism is preserving the uncertainty of sustainable

tourism applications for many years (Hunter & Green, 1995; Butler, 1998).