GIS can be an effective tool for sustainable tourism development by helping decision makers evaluate environmental impacts, identify potential conflicts, and model relationships between tourism and other sectors. GIS allows tourism data to be integrated and analyzed spatially, helping with resource mapping, impact assessment, and tourism planning. Some benefits of GIS for tourism include cost savings through efficiency, improved decision making considering location factors, better communication of geographic information, and managing tourism development geographically. While challenges remain, GIS has been successfully used in tourism applications like mapping attractions and building interactive online maps.

1. GIS applications in tourism- a tool for sustainable tourism
By Pankaj Kumar, IIT Bombay
“Tourism carries a tremendous potential that must be acknowledged as essential for
the future of world heritage, but without proper management, we can easily get out of
control”
By Bonnie Burnham
Decision-making in tourism development and planning is becoming
increasingly complex as organisations and communities have to come to terms
with the competing economic, social and environmental demands of
sustainable development. In this area, Geographical Information Systems (GIS)
can be regarded as providing a tool box of techniques and technologies of wide
applicability to the achievement of sustainable tourism development. Spatial
data can be used to explore conflicts, examine impacts and assist decision-
making. GIS can play a role in impact assessment, auditing environmental
conditions, examining the suitability of locations for proposed developments,
identifying conflicting interests and modelling relationships. Systematic
evaluation of environmental impact is often hindered by information
deficiencies but GIS tools, for data integration, manipulation, visualisation and
analysis, can reduce this hindrance.
What is Tourism?
"Tourism is a composite of activities, facilities, services and industries
that deliver a travel experience, that is, transportation, accommodation,
eating and drinking establishments, entertainment, recreation, historical
and cultural experiences, destination attractions, shopping and other
services available to travelers away from home."
What does tourism provide to the nation?
Tourism is one of the industries with the strongest effect on the economy, because it
helps in developing other sectors. The World Travel & Tourism Council calculated that
tourism generated ₹6.4 trillion (US$95 billion) or 6.6% of the nation's GDP in 2012. It
supported 39.5 million jobs, 7.7% of its total employment. The sector is predicted to
grow at an average annual rate of 7.9% till 2023 making India the third fastest growing
tourism destination over the next decade. India has a large medical tourism sector
which is expected to grow at an estimated rate of 30% annually to reach about ₹95
billion (US$1.4 billion) by 2018. About 22.57 million tourists arrived in India in 2014,
compared to 19.95 million in 2013.

2. What is GIS?
GIS is a computer based powerful set of tools for collecting, storing, retrieving,
mapping, analyzing, transforming and displaying spatial and non-spatial data from
geographic world for a particular set of purposes that varies for each discipline.
Why Use GIS in Tourism?
 Both GIS and tourism share a common characteristic, that is, both cross the
boundaries of disciplines and application areas.
 GIS has been applied in many fields including geography, forestry, Urban
development and planning, and environmental studies.
 Similarly, tourism has been a subject of interest to geographers, economists,
business, environmental planners, anthropologists, and archaeologists. There
has always been a direct relationship between tourism and cartography. Maps
of travel routes and general information about the areas to visit are used in
selecting the destination and in planning travel and stay.
Tourism Maps
GIS applications can provide three different types of information:
 Tourism resource maps – Analyse the resource set to identify how much is
available and where it is. To determine the capability of an area for the
creation of new tourism products or services, identifying locations suitable to
tourists or tourism.
 Tourism use maps – To analyse the resource set to evaluate land use
options and identify zones of conflict or complementarity’s, such as access
points, water, wildlife habitats etc.
 Tourism capability maps – To analyse the resource set to monitor tourist
resources at risk due to management, planning decisions and other sectors.
GIS in Tourism Planning
In the tourism industry, GIS is used to provide:
 A digital map base for printed maps
 Internet mapping by digital files
 Mobile mapping by digital files
 Attractions map
 Website with interactive mapping
Creation of Spatial Database
Tourism planning requires more spatial data collecting and processing, as all locations
and their interrelations should be defined and analyzed within a spatial context.

3. Application Scenario
 A thematic mapper can be used to
integrate tourist information and GIS
data to build tourist maps.
 SVG can offer the possibility to turn
layers on or off to create the
representation which fits to the
requirements of the user.
 All the layers can be combined
without restrictions to achieve the
goal of the user.
Potential Benefits of Tourism GIS
GIS benefits organizations of all sizes and in almost every industry. There is a growing
interest in and awareness of the economic and
strategic value of GIS, in part because of more
standards-based technology and greater
awareness of the benefits demonstrated by GIS
users.
• Cost savings resulting from greater
efficiency: These are associated either with
carrying out the mission (i.e., labor savings
from automating or improving a workflow) or
improvements in the mission itself. A good
case for both of these is Sears, which

4. implemented GIS in its logistics operations and has seen dramatic
improvements.
• Better decision making: This typically has to do with making better decisions
about location. Common examples include real estate site selection,
route/corridor selection, zoning, planning, conservation, natural resource
extraction, etc. People are beginning to realize that making the correct decision
about a location is strategic to the success of an organization.
• Improved communication: GIS-based maps and visualizations greatly assist
in understanding situations and story-telling. They are a new language that
improves communication between different teams, departments, disciplines,
professional fields, organizations, and the public.
• Better geographic information recordkeeping: Many organizations have a
primary responsibility of maintaining authoritative records about the status and
change of geography (geographic accounting). Cultural geography examples
are zoning, population census, land ownership, and administrative
boundaries. Physical geography examples include forest
inventories, biological inventories, environmental measurements, water flows,
and a whole host of geographic accountings.
• Managing geographically: In government and many large corporations, GIS
is becoming essential to understand what is going on. Senior administrators
and executives at the highest levels of government use GIS information
products to communicate. These products provide a visual framework for
conceptualizing, understanding, and prescribing action. Examples include
briefings about various geographic patterns and relationships including land
use, crime, the environment, and defense/security situations.
Conclusion
• Successful implementation of GIS promotes importance of information over
technology.
• GIS has been successfully used in tourism for collecting, analyzing,
modelling and visual presentation of tourist data. GIS is also used for bring
the dereferenced data (spatial and non-spatial) of geographic location into
digital maps.
• The integration of tourism data and GIS data is still a big challenge for the
tourism industry today.

5. References
1. http://gisandscience.com/2009/09/14/top-five-benefits-of-gis/
2. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09669589908667333
3. https://dkrypted.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/gisintourism.pdf