Decision Support Systems in a Tourism Destination: Literature Survey and Model Building

Information and communication technologies have profound implications for the tourism industry. They are being used extensively in a great variety of functions and count innumerable applications. Among these, Decision Support Systems (DSS) can play a fundamental role for their capacity to give organizations and people managing tourism destinations the possibility to base all the decisions concerning policies, infrastructure development and stakeholders progress on sound and rational bases. Aim of this paper is to present an overview of DSS usage in tourism management organizations and to portray a general framework for the design of an effective practical implementation. Initial considerations on development issues are addressed.