Geographical Information System Based Decision Support System for Tourism Planning and Development

During the last ten years, advances in information technology have had a dramatic influence on the tourism industry. This paper intends to present a geographical information system designed as a decision support system (DSS) for tourism planning and development. A user friendly computer system, called Tourism DSS, has been developed for the use of public and private organisations. The county of Cumbria has been chosen as a case study. The main functions of this DSS are (i) to display different kinds of geographic, socio-economic, environmental and tourism data of Cumbria that map onto a number of problems confronting the planner, in particular; (ii) to find potential sites for specific tourism investment under the diverse criteria relevant to the users; and (iii) to demonstrate the possible impacts of tourism investments.