The influences of developing information technologies on travelling agency: A research on the field

As all the fields of the global work areas which are rapidly developing and changing, enterprises in the field of tourism are in search of different methods and strategies in order to take advantage, maintain and improve their profits. One of the service enterprises, travel agencies have had to follow this developing technology even though they have the characteristic of labaur intensivity. They have started to base their competing policies on this concept.As a result of progress in the areas of information and communication, computers have enabled the systematical arrangement, storing and processing and returning of information if needed. Internet, which came into existance in 1967, is now in every walk of daily life and it has come to an effective position on the works of people, enterprises and state establishments.The presentation of information via Internet is much more cost-effective compared to the other general distributitor systems and it has enabled the information to be delivered to a great mass of people in a shorter time. As being free from time and space limitations, it has been used in commercial eneterprises and it has brought up the online (real time)selling system.Tourism is one of the leading sectors which has been effected greatly by these technological developments. Especially the travel agencies have been reshaped by the developments of information and communication technology.As a result of this, the study of reflections of the rapidly developing information technologies on the travel agencies and analysing their effects have been the main point of this reseach. The study consists of three parts. In the first part, the focus is on information technology and Internet concepts and the advantages and the disadvantages of marketing via Internet have been discussed. In the second part, general information is presented by scanning the use and the practice of information technology which belongs to the last ten years in travel agencies. In the last part, the ratio of using information and communication techology by travel agencies and whether they use the online sale system effectively or not are examined. An extensive research about the travel agencies in Ankara has been made and the results of it have been discussed.One hundred travel agencies has participated in the survey in Ankara. The survey shows that 60 percent of the agencies consider the internet as the main communication resource and prefer it to the traditional marketing ways of. Also 57 percent thinks that internet increases the sales at considerable rate. 63 percent believe that internet decreases the expenses of the agencies. Besides, ıt has found out that 71 of travel agencies has been using online selling system actively, and in following years ıt is expected that this rate will increase.