Meltem Ozturan

Internet use among travel agencies in Turkey: an exploratory study

Abstract Recent developments in information technologies (ITs) and in particular the introduction of the Internet and the World Wide Web (WWW) in the early 1990s started a new era in communications and changed the promotion and sales of tourism products. Companies with established web sites are in a position to undertake productive marketing activities. This paper presents the results of an exploratory study of the current stage of internet use among travel agencies in Turkey. It shows that even though there is an increase in the use of the Internet, Turkish travel agencies use it simply as an additional mode of communication. The current emphasis is still on traditional marketing communication channels such as printed media, and telephone. Their web sites do not possess the interactive features required for internet marketing.

A Framework for a National Tourism Information System of Turkey

ABSTRACT Throughout the world, information plays an important role in decision-making, as well as problem solving in business. Information systems are widely used for collection and dissemination of information. Due to the complex set of interrelationships between people, places and products that information involves, tourism is one of the areas in which technology-based information systems are commonly used. Turkey has a great potential in tourism industry. However, she has problems in collecting and disseminating tourism information. A research project has been activated to explore the existing tourism information, computer infrastructure and tourism information needs of Turkish tourism organizations. Furthermore, it is also aimed to gain insights into the preferences for the organizational aspects of a national tourism information system. As a result of this research, an organizational model for development and management of a National Tourism Information System for Turkey is proposed.

Perceptions about and attitude toward the usage of e-learning in corporate training

As companies are driven to reshape their established practices with the impact of advancements in information and communication technologies, corporate training emerges as a distinct area requiring technological transformation. This exploratory study aims to examine the attitudes of a sample of 106 of the top 500 corporations in Turkey regarding the usage of e-learning for corporate training. Findings show that most of these firms currently have a hesitant attitude toward this development. Through factor analysis, the main advantages for using e-learning in corporate training have been classified as employee commitment and motivation, convenience and accessibility, customization and outsourcing, and cost effectiveness while the disadvantages have been grouped as personal and organizational. Consequently, attitudinal differences toward e-learning between companies have been explored according to two scale-related variables (employee size and company revenue) and two variables about organizational readiness (the existence of a Learning & Education Department and the current use of e-learning). Blended learning is preferred instead of purely traditional or totally online learning in companies.Employee motivation, convenience, customization and cost effectiveness are the main advantages of corporate e-learning.Main drawbacks are lack of sociability, possible difficulty, and lack of awareness of the benefits of such systems.Perceived advantages of e-learning prevail the disadvantages in an organizational context.

A Review on Methods for the Assessment of Information System Projects

Recently, it is inevitable that businesses invest in many information system (IS) projects in order to gain a competitive advantage within the internal industry and global environment. The important point is the selection of the appropriate IS environment, hence the optimal IS investment methods with respect to changing technological needs. In this respect, both empirical and conceptual studies are reviewed to identify the relevant IS/IT investment methods. After an extensive literature review, 51 relevant articles are identified. The IS/IT investment methods studied in these articles are classified and examined within the three categories: financial, non-financial, and hybrid. The results reveal that most of studies focus on a mixed usage of financial and non-financial methods called hybrid methods, whereas financial methods are used more frequently when compared to non-financial methods during the selected research period. On the other hand, the usage of pure financial methods decreases in recent years, while the usage of hybrid and non-financial methods increases in the same period.

#europehappinessmap: A Framework for Multi-Lingual Sentiment Analysis via Social Media Big Data (A Twitter Case Study)

The growth and popularity of social media platforms have generated a new social interaction environment thus a new collaboration and communication network among individuals. These platforms own tremendous amount of data about users’ behaviors and sentiments since people create, share or exchange their information, ideas, pictures or video using them. One of these popular platforms is Twitter, which via its voluntary information sharing structure, provides researchers data potential of benefit for their studies. Based on Twitter data, in this study a multilingual sentiment detection framework is proposed to compute European Gross National Happiness (GNH). This framework consists of a novel data collection, filtering and sampling method, and a newly constructed multilingual sentiment detection algorithm for social media big data, and tested with nine European countries (United Kingdom, Germany, Sweden, Turkey, Portugal, The Netherlands, Italy, France and Spain) and their national languages over a six year period. The reliability of the data is checked with peak/troughs comparison for special days from Wikipedia news lists. The validity is checked with a group of correlation analyses with OECD Life Satisfaction survey reports’, Euro-Dollar and other currency exchanges, and national stock market time series data. After validity and reliability confirmations, the European GNH map is drawn for six years. The main problem addressed is to propose a novel multilingual social media sentiment analysis framework for calculating GNH for countries and change the way of OECD type organizations’ survey and interview methodology. Also, it is believed that this framework can serve more detailed results (e.g., daily or hourly sentiments of society in different languages).