The Effect of Information and Communication Technology in Urban Tourism Development

Tourism is one of the most pioneering and economic activities of the world which allocates more than 10% of the universal employment and national production. Additionally, world is inevitably a global village nowadays with vast and profound communications. Today, the information technology and its usage are of the most fundamental keys in countries improvement, especially developing nations. Necessity of paying attention to tourism and the usage of modern technology for developing tourism to benefit from its numerous economic advantages for countries made it essential to investigate the relation between improvement of information and communication technology and tourism development. ICT is now the basic element in the world tourism arena and has an impressive contribution in national and transnational competitions of the countries. The outcome of the development of above issues about tourism caused on the one hand, the formation of E-tourism and on the other hand, the formation of 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 that tourists evaluate their destinations before traveling and get a virtual experience in their mind about tourism framework. In addition, this issue made it possible to publicize the process of choosing travel’s destinations. Findings of this research indicate Iran’s weakness in the E-tourism arena. This article aims to determine the whole domain of tourism system, its suitable ground of information, E-tourism‘s effects, challenges which exist in this field and finally suggest some methods appropriate for its development. The research’s type is qualitative and the method which has been applied is descriptive-analytic. Documentary and library sources have been used in this research.