Spatial Based Tour Service in Facilitating Tourism Development in Tigray, Hawzen Woreda

Abstract

Tourism is the temporary movement of people to destinations outside their normal places of work and residence, the activities undertaken during their stay in those destinations, and the facilities created to provide to their needs. Tigray has so many attraction tourist areas such as more than hundred twenty rock-hewn churches; most concentrated in the Wukro-Gheralta corridor, constitute the core of Tigray’s open air museum. But the region has no its own tourism mobile GIS web site to offer basic booking functionality in space and time, and are unable to support customers in their searches. Clearly, complexity and quantity of e-tourism products might become a critical problem because users cannot look up entire databases in order to choose the most suitable products for them in for that the researcher developed a mobile GIS model for tour services. Methods included first investigate the places that are interested to tourists in order to provide basic spatial information through field survey and documentations, second identify the issues that affect tourism development and third develop a mobile GIS model for tourism order for disseminating this tourism geo information through Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), mobile phones and other handheld devices. A prototype of the system has been developed and tested; and its relevance was validated by the office of tourism. The study showed that with the use of GIS technologies, tourism development can be significantly improved in places where resources are limited such as in Hawzen Woreda office of tourism.

 Keywords: Tourism, Mobile GIS, Tigray, Ethiopia