1 Building Data Warehouse System For The Tourism Sector Tamer A. Abdulaziz Ibrahim F. Moawad Wesal M. Abu-Alam Tourism Studies Department Information Systems Department Tourism Studies Department High Institute for Tourism & Hotels Faculty of Computer & Information Science Faculty of Tourism & Hotels Six October City, 12563,Egypt Ain Shams University Helwan University egtato@yahoo.com Abassia, 11566, Egypt Al-Manial, 11792, Egypt Abdulaziz_tamer@yahoo.com Ibrahim_moawad@cis.asu.edu.eg wesal_alam@hotmail.com Abstract- Decision makers in the tourism sector face real challenges. There is no chance to access a unified data source that can supply information to meet their inquiries and expectations. In this paper, we propose a data warehouse system for supporting the decision makers in the Egyptian tourism sector. The methodology followed to build this system is descried in details to guide the other developing countries who are trying to support their decision makers in the tourism sector by building a similar data warehouse system. In addition, we evaluated the tourism data warehouse system. The results of evaluation indicated that it can meet the needs and requirements of the decision makers in the tourism sector. Keywords - Decision Support System, Decision Maker, Data Warehouse, Data Marts. I. INTRODUCTION Tourism has become one of the largest and fastest growing economic sectors in the world. Both of developing and developed countries have turned modern tourism into a key driver of socio-economic progress through export revenues, the creation of jobs and enterprises, and infrastructure development. Tourism is a powerful vehicle for economic growth and job creation all over the world. Egypt depends mainly on the tourism sector not only to support its national economy but also to solve the problem of unemployment. According to the Egyptian Ministry of Planning and International Cooperation [1], tourism provides: I) direct jobs for nearly three million Egyptian people, II) critical income to more than 70 industries and III) twenty percent of the state's foreign currency. Nevertheless, in spite of the great effect of tourism on the Egyptian national economy, tourism has severely suffered in recent years due to the conflicts that have occurred since the 25th of January revolution specially that tourism is a fragile industry, which is a vulnerable to any political unrest. World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC) [2] exemplified that regarding the travel and tourism competitiveness index, "Egypt is ranked the 85th overall 140 countries in 2013 going down 10 positions since 2011”. This difficult situation for Egypt's tourism caused financial problems at all levels as well as a high unemployment rate, which has recently reached 13% as [1] mentioned. Besides, tourism is considered a composed industry. Thereby, tourism development plans are associated with many economic sectors. In spite of that, Egypt has no unified and consistent data source that can supply information to all the decision makers in the different economic sectors for improving the tourism sector. For example, on deciding to establish a new hotel in a specific tourist destination, it is important for a decision maker to have information about the number of tourists visiting this area, the number of the existing hotel units by category, and the number of hotel employees needed together with their qualifications. This example shows the urgent need of acquiring information from different sectors like Tourism, Education, and Employment. Another problem faces the decision makers in the Egyptian tourism sector is dealing with large volumes of different valuable tourism data. These data include tourist numbers, tourism nights, percentage of hotel occupations, the total revenue from the tourism sector at the national level, etc. These data are normally stored in hard copies with different formats and in operational databases, which are not easily or timely accessible to decision makers. This leads to providing inconsistent, inefficient, and poor information.