Data mining in travel agencies:A reseach in Antalya region

The corporations in the tourism sector-one of the sectors using information technologies the most- store the data about the costumers and the services they purchase from the beginning to the end of the travel. By applying data mining techniques it is aimed to obtain unforeseeable, concealed in data, meaningful, potentially versatile and valuable information out of that data.By the use of the data mining methods and techniques in databases of the tourism sector, it is possible to get information that will enable especially the managers of the tourism agencies or tourism corporations or legislators of that area to make predictions. In this study the steps of the data mining applications in the tourism area are displayed and theoretical and applications information is cited from the related literature.In the phase of application, the transfer of the data in the agency databases, filtration and data preprocessing activities were carried out and data were streamlined for analysis. In the database K-Means Algorithm and Apriori Algorithms were implemented in the Clustering and Association Models as data mining techniques and valuable knowledge that will help travel decision makers was obtained and that was enriched with charts and tables.In this study K-Means Algorithm -one of the Clustering Models- was utilized to cognize the customer and product groups and Apriori Algorithm- one of the Association Rules Algorithms- was utilized to ascertain the relationship between the products. The rules derived by operating the model were set and the meanings of the rules were explained in the following sections. Besides, the conclusion of the study was assessed by presenting suggestions for the ones, who plan to study on this area.