Impact of Information Communication Technology in Enhancing the Management of the Natural and Cultural Heritage Resources in Idanre Hills for E-tourism Attraction

ABSTRACT Many natural and cultural heritage resources that are supposed to create revenue generation and employment opportunity through tourism are nonchalantly abandoned without any developmental attention given to them. This has really deprived the community and the nation as a whole the economic growth, and recognition they deserve. To mitigate this problem, presented in this paper is the impact of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) in enhancing the management of the natural and cultural heritage resources in Idanre Hills and its environs. A detail assessment of the level of development of the hills’ cultural and natural features was carried out based on the four components of tourism, namely: (1) Attraction, (2) accessibility, (3) accommodation, and (4) amenities. A conceptual e-tourism designed for the hills has the basic component of e-commerce. The stratified random sampling technique was used to collect the primary data, with the assistance of a semi-structured questionnaire. A 4-point Likert-type scale was employed in the questionnaire to illustrate the impacts of ICT in tourism. Analysis of variance perception of respondents about the impact of ICT on tourism business showed generalized additive model Group Arithmetic Mean (GAM) of 167.4; this simply means that the arithmetic means of respondents that accepted the application of ICT were more than the arithmetic means of respondents that rejected the application.