Smart Tourism Industry in Iran

EasyChair Preprint 507

Abstract

Smart tourism is a progress for the tourism industry from traditional concepts to the integration of web-based technologies that led to the emergence of new tourism-related practices (Gretzel, Sigala, Xiang, & Koo, 2015). In the Internet era, around the world, there are more and more tourists search online before they make tourism decisions.

Iran was considered to be one of the Middle East's top tourist destinations for both Western and regional visitors during the period 1967–1977 (Morakabati, 2011). For example, Iran had 700,000 tourists from the USA, UK, West Germany, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia in 1978. However, the Iranian tourism industry, despite enormous potential, has suffered significantly since the Iranian Revolution in 1979 (also referred to as the ‘Islamic Revolution’). The revolution also gave subsequent negative imagery in many tourism-generating markets (Seyfi, Hall, & Kuhzady, 2018).

Thanks to the internet and the new technology, there are many online websites that allow Iranians to shop and look for products’ information online nowadays. For instances, Digikala (digikala.com) is an online shopping website which is like Amazon, and Takhfifan (takhfifan.com) is a website that introduces the businesses with discount (which is like Groupon) and many other websites. Tourism and hospitality industries are included in these changes. For instance, people use online booking websites to make their hotel and tour reservations online. With more and more Iranians shopping and conducting business online, smart tourism has become an emerging field of development in Iran. To facilitate the smart tourism industry, investigating how Iranian consumers perceive the tourism websites is a warrant.

Keyphrases: Iran, Smart Tourism, online booking

@booklet{EasyChair:507,
  author    = {Mahboubeh Cheraghian and Tun Min},
  title     = {Smart Tourism Industry in Iran},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 507},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2018}}