Presented at the Ist International Symposium on Innovative Approaches in Scientific Studies (ISAS 2018), Kemer-Antalya, Turkey, Apr 11, 2018

SETSCI Conference Proceedings, 2018, 2, Page (s): 208-208 , https://doi.org/

Published Date: 23 June 2018    | 947     10

Tourism is one of the rapid growth areas of the globalizing world. No matter what the extent of development, countries pursue a great deal of investments in this industry. Turkey is among these as being in top ten lists of international tourist arrivals (inbound tourism) of the world in recent years. Nowadays internet and web-based technologies transform tourism promotion to virtual presentations. Among these presentations, some countries proceeded an effort to introduce their tourism values through dynamic maps. Such utilizations offer the opportunity to reach the valuable information of touristic locations for the consumers. GIS have been utilized for tourism purposes as it is also in usage of other disciplines. Special interests of tourism consumers made the tourism thought more complex as they realized specific research and planning in the pre-trip process. To meet such queries with more visuals and much quality, various maps were prepared according to the promotional objectives. That’s because, the maps have been one of the fundamental tourist information sources. In this study, some examples of GIS in hospitality and travel sectors both from pilot applications from Turkey and the successful practices through the world would be presented. The objective of the study is to find some good practices that might be adapted in Turkey in the view of tourism development. Some pilot studies about GIS in Turkey were found to be implemented in some cities such as Istanbul, Antalya, Trabzon, Afyon and Kahramanmaraş; however they were all defined as limited.

As a conclusion, a number of further developed GIS applications in Dubai, Dublin, and Hong Kong cases would be introduced
in depth for a guide to adapt the positive aspects of these applications. If the usage of GIS increases in both overall and specific
destination marketing sites, stakeholders of tourism would find higher quality of information as the technology improves  

Keywords - Tourism, Geographical Information Systems, Destination marketing