The Effect of Information and Communication Technology on Urban Tourism Development

Tourism is one of the most pioneering industry and major economic activity of the world which allocates more than 10% of the universal employment and national production. Additionally, world becomes a global village with vast and profound communications. Today, the information technology and its usages are the most fundamental keys for improvement of countries, especially for developing nations. Necessity of paying attention to tourism and the usage of modern technology for development of tourism is beneficial from its numerous economic advantages for countries which made it essential to investigate the relationship between improvement of information and communication technology and tourism development. ICT is now the basic element in the world of tourism and has an impressive contribution in national and transnational competitions of the countries. On the one hand, the outcome of the developing above issues in tourism created E-tourism and on the other hand, they created virtual tourism. By and large, the usage of information and communication technologies and its development in the field of supply and demand of tourism caused tourists evaluate their destinations before traveling and get a virtual experience in their mind about tourism framework. Furthermore, this issue made it possible to publicize the process of choosing travel’s destinations. Findings of this research indicate Iran’s weakness in the field of E-tourism. This article aims to determine the whole domain of tourism system, creating proper infrastructures, E-tourism‘s effects, challenges which exist in this field and finally suggest some methods appropriate for its development. This is a qualitative research and the method of study is descriptive-analytic. Documentary and library sources have been used in this research.