Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Table 10.3. What is evident from Table 10.3 is the application of GIS to tourism
planning, particularly in tourism and recreational resource management, as well as in
tourism marketing (Elliott-White and Finn 1998; Farsari and Prastacos 2004). The ability
to incorporate the dynamics of tourism and recreational activity and its effect on tourism
and recreational resources has a major role to play. As Boyd and Butler (1996) observed,
GIS can be used to identify suitable areas for ecotourism in Northern Ontario. The
process of employing a GIS involved the inventory mapping, buffering (which is the
identification of areas of human intrusion) with overlaps to map the appropriate areas for
ecotourism. A very early application of GIS in the UK by Duffield and Coppock (1975)
was associated with the development of the Tourism and Recreation Information Package
(TRIP) to assist with tourism planning in Scotland. What the use of GIS highlights is
which agency is the most appropriate framework for tourism and recreation planning, as
outlined in Chapter 9, given the decline in strategic planning in the 1980s and 1990s.
What Bahaire and Elliott-White's (1999) review of GIS and its use in tourism reveals is a
passivity in geographers' impact and influence. The problem is that the technique is
valuable, but few geographers are making the fundamental linkage with public sector
planning agencies, political decision-makers and policy-
Table 10.2:
Capabilities of a Geographical
Information System
Examples of
functional capabilities
of a GIS
Examples of basic questions that can
be investigated using a GIS (after
Rhind 1990)
Examples of tourism
applications
Data entry, storage and
manipulation
Location
What is at?
Tourism resource inventories
Map production
Condition
Where is it?
Identifying most suitable
locations for development
Database integration
Trend
What has changed?
Measuring tourism impacts
Data queries and
searches
Routing
Which is the best route?
Visitor management/flows
Spatial analysis
Pattern
What is the pattern?
Analysing relationships
associated with resource use
Spatial modelling
Modelling
What if…?
Assessing potential impacts
of tourism development
Source:
Bahaire and Elliott-White (1999:161)
Table 10.3:
Problems of tourism and the potential
of Geographical Information Systems (based on
Butler 1992:33)
Problems
of tourism
Nature of problem
GIS application
Ignorance
• Of dimensions, nature, power of
tourism, i.e. by key decision-
makers and communities
A key point is that stakeholders do not have the
types of information needed to assert their point of
view. Using GIS for the
systematic inventory
of
tourism resources and analysis of
trends
can help
ameliorate this problem
