ICT for Sustainable Development of the Tourism Industry in Cambodia

Abstract

Tourism industry/development constitutes one of only a few viable development options and is often the principal source of foreign exchange earnings without exporting any national wealth or resources. It plays an important role in the sustainable development of many developing countries. The current national strategic development goal of Cambodia has embraced the tourism sector is one of the major driving economics sources after garment industry and agricultural products. In the 2011 report of World Economic Forum (WEF), Travel and Tourism Competitiveness Index (TTCI) which developed to measure the factors and policies that make it attractive to develop the Tourism sectors in different countries ranked Cambodia 109 (Cambodia’s overall score index is 3.44) out of 119 countries. TTCI was computed by using three principal sub indices while ICT (Information Communications Technology) infrastructure was one of the individual variable for computing the Travel and Tourism business environment and Infrastructure sub index. Seeing Cambodia sits in the low position in TTCI and the awareness of the command of the pivotal ICT role in all functions, the study attempts to look into in particular development of uses and applications of ICT in Tourism sector in Cambodia. Furthermore, the study uses the article on the Adoption of ICT on Chinese’s tourism industry for a benchmarking case study. As this paper is the initiative study on E-Tourism in Cambodia, the attempt is to bring the interest of the government and the tourism entrepreneurs to visualize the importance and competitiveness by utilizing ICT in the tourism application.