DEVELOPMENT PROSPECTS OF THE TOURISM INDUSTRY IN THE DIGITAL AGE

The advent of the Internet and the development of information and communication technologies have revolutionized the economy of the information society and led to the digital economy, which required a major transformation of the tourism industry by creating new business models and redesigning all processes. In this paper I conducted an analysis of how modern technology affects the tourism industry and the need to achieve sustainable tourism. Thus, first I presented Romanian tourism features in the digital era, and I have highlighted the benefits of the online promotion of tourism and then I conducted an analysis of electronic tourism and I show the benefits for both the travel companies and tourists alike. In the last part of the paper I emphasized the importance of using intelligent agents and the semantic web in tourism, concluding that virtual reality is not only fiction, the latest findings in the field of information and communications technology offer the possibility of "teleportation" in the most remote places on Earth.