Role of geographical information systems in tourism decision making process: a review

摘要

This paper presents a literature review of the application of the geographical information system (GIS) in tourism. Geographic information system is a tool to acquire, explore and analyse the geo-spatially distributed objects and their associated attribute information that can improve decision-making. This article critically analyses some of the recent papers published in reputed journals and gives a brief idea about many of the referred publications. Papers are also categorized according to the identified themes, and on the basis of the areas of the applications in tourism. The references have also been grouped region-wise and year-wise in order to track the growth of GIS applications in tourism. To help readers extract quick and meaningful information, the references are summarized in various tabular formats and charts. A total of 201 application papers are referred to in this paper, 53 of them are critically analysed. It is hoped that this work will provide a ready reference on GIS in tourism, and act as an informative summary kit for the researchers and practitioners for their future work.