PROMOTING TOURISM IN NIGERIA THROUGH AN ENHANCED TOURISM MANAGEMENT SYSTEM - A PRELIMINARY STUDY.

In an era where information plays a vital role in our society because its use is unavoidable inour day-to-day activities; tourism has become popular as a leisure way of travel and it relies on informationtechnologyinordertodeliverqualityproductsandservicestoits customers. This paper proposes an Automated Tourism Management System (ATMS) to curb the peculiar problem of the current manual systems used by tourist centres. The slow, poor, tedious, inadequate, stressful and error-prone manual system currently used for tourist activities in Nigerian tourism sector is making the tourist management business difficult. This research work combines the concept of web based application and takes advantage of information and communication technology to provide all the necessary information needed by a tourist to embark on a tour. This researchworkalsoanalysestheproblemsassociatedwiththecurrentmanualsystemandprovides a solution by designing and implementing a web based ATMS using the V-Shaped model of the SDLC and the system was implemented using PHP andMYSQL. The result obtained shows a user friendly system that is easy to use by both the administrators and tourists.