Smartphone Applications Enhancing role of Tourist Guide

2008 7th International Conference on Mobile Business, 2008

The penetration of high-end mobile devices equipped with GPS and enhanced with multimedia features together with decreasing mobile data prices have resulted in larger usage of mobile services. One of the application domains particularly well-suited for mobile services is tourism, not least since tourists can be assisted especially during the vacation itself. Currently, there is a proliferation of such mobile tourist guides, proposing an unmanageable number of diverse functionalities. To counteract this situation, the contribution of this paper is threefold. First, an evaluation framework is proposed, comprising both, a classification of mobile tourist services and a categorization of their delivery aspects in terms of several orthogonal dimensions. Second, on basis of this framework, four representative mobile tourist guides are evaluated, thereby demonstrating the frameworks' applicability. Third, several lessons learned are discussed, thereby shedding light on the current state of effort in the area of mobile tourist guides.

Tourists need guide books and maps to navigate through a new location. This can be a blessing and a curse. Though the information obtained from maps and guide books can be very helpful, it can also be very bulky and confusing, but with the rise of GPS-based mobile application, information has become more portable, synthesized and user-friendly. However several social behaviours in many fields have been heavily modified in the last decade, due to the growth of the Internet and its users. Although there is a rise in mobile application development for tourists, most of the mobile systems are yet to handle certain issues like; tourists' information management, accessibility by tourists and the technical know-how of this applications. This paper reviews the various benefits of these applications to the economy and to the tourists. It also looked at the various limitations that may arise or in existence and possible solutions to resolve these difficulties.

Asian Journal For Convergence In Technology (AJCT) ISSN -2350-1146, 2016

In a society undergoing rapid changes, future museums will contribute to human culture by means of smartphone technology that promotes active interaction with the public. As the electronic techniques advance, computing machines have been miniaturized and smart phones are equipped with powerful processors, large memories, sensor, Bluetooth and WiFi connectivity. Since android based smart phone is a personal belonging, it is an excellent candidate device on which a context-aware service is provided. This paper introduces our Android application that recognizes the tourist place in which a user is interested and displays useful information like historical importance in the form of text, photo gallery and video clips. The goal of proposed work is to provide correct and easy information to the tourist, to make tourism attractive.

Procedia Computer Science, 2017

Indonesia is a country that has seventeen thousand islands and located in a very strategic location. That reason makes Indonesia becoming a place that is interesting to be visited by many tourists either local or international. Every year the number of tourists who visited Indonesia has greatly increased 1,2 and transformed the tourism to be an important sector for Indonesia economical. The rapid development of tourism sector in Indonesia must be equilibrated by the evolution of technology and the supported facilities. Now, the usage of a smartphone technology is one of the important things and a part of modern people daily activities. By taking the advantages of a smartphone, this study is conducted to develop an android application that is named Smart Travelling. Smart travelling has many features that can facilitate every tourist who visited Indonesia, such as recognizes any tourist attractions, shows any events that nearby visited attractions, displays the nearest police station and hospital for an emergency case, and saves the history of the recognized objects. The main idea of the tourist attractions recognition here is to implement an image recognition using landmark detection feature from Google Cloud Vision Application Program Interface (API) 3 technology which helps the tourist to easily remember and access any information regarding the visited attractions. In this study, the result is a completed application which is evaluated using questionnaires to 35 randomly selected participants. Based on the evaluation, the smart travelling achieves positive inputs and mostly the participants agree that the image recognition feature is really helping them. Furthermore, we also obtained a significant result for the scan landmark testing, which is 86% for the accuracy.

The Open Knowlege Society. A …, 2008

Mobile guides have been in the spot light for the past decade or so they are becoming excessively available to tourists visiting places around the world. Most of which are to be used via a network connection on a browser based device and others as such as proprietary mobile applications, installed ondevice. As such, some guides are used as navigational assistants in large cities solely for exploratory services and others can be used indoors as museum guides. This paper researches past and present mobile guide applications using a detailed set of evaluation criteria to extract design principles which can be used by an application-designer or an application-developer.

2021 International Congress of Advanced Technology and Engineering (ICOTEN), 2021

Finding information about tourist places to visit is a challenging problem that people face while visiting different countries. This problem is accentuated when people are coming from different countries, speak different languages, and are from all segments of society. In this context, visitors and pilgrims face important problems to find the appropriate doaas when visiting holy places. In this paper, we propose a mobile application that helps the user find the appropriate doaas for a given holy place in an easy and intuitive manner. Three different options are developed to achieve this goal: 1) manual search, 2) GPS location to identify the holy places and therefore their corresponding doaas, and 3) deep learning (DL) based method to determine the holy place by analyzing an image taken by the visitor. Experiments show good performance of the proposed mobile application in providing the appropriate doaas for visited holy places.

2019

Thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for Bachelor of Computer Science (Hons.) Netcentric Computing Faculty of Computer and Mathematical Sciences

Contemporary Trends in Tourism and Hospitality 2013, Novi Sad, 2013

In the e-Turist project we developed a mobile application that provide experience comparable to that offered by a professional tour guide, but tailored to each individual tourist. The tourist can enter his interests (entertainment, active tourism, gastronomy, cultural and natural heritage), the available time and any special requirements he/she may have. Based on these and other data such as opening time, the application prepares a personalized sightseeing program. To this end, it uses a recommender system that combines the extensive knowledge on tourism provided by Turistica with state-of-the art intelligent computer methods developed at Jožef Stefan Institute. Afterwards, the application guides the tourist using the GPS, providing a multilingual written and voice description accompanied by photos. The tourist may comment and rate each sight, which is then used by the recommender system and tourism services providers to improve their services.

Journal of The Faculty of Tourism and Hotels - Mansoura University, 2022

This study aims to shed light on technological innovation, one of the most significant contemporary trends in the field of tour guiding. The first research to discuss technology and innovation from the viewpoint of tour guides. Prior to discussing innovation from the perspective of professionals in the travel, tourism, and tour guiding fields, the study first discussed the significance of innovation broadly. The study used smartphone apps as a model, and it split the many forms of innovation in mobile apps into five categories, including apps for tour guides, maps and navigation, simultaneous translation, virtual applications, and digital code readers. The efficiency with which the tour guide's responsibilities were carried out in the age of digital transformation was greatly increased by these applications, which served as instances of contemporary technical job tools. The study also provided some novel recommendations for raising the effectiveness of these applications. The study found that technological innovation is one of the most important types of innovations that the tourism guidance industry will need both now and in the future, and that mobile phone applications are the technological tool that is most capable of resolving the vast majority of issues this industry is currently facing. The information from these applications may be relied upon to build global databases with details about the quantity and variety of tour guides in every nation, which will be very useful for establishing labour rules and adopting legislation. Mobile applications are one of the most significant virtual work platforms that can be relied upon to develop career opportunities for the category of tour guides remotely and via the Internet.

Information Technology & Tourism, 2006

This article describes a product (the "Mobility Agent") that delivers Internet-based travel and tourism-related services through fixed and mobile devices. Intelligent agent technology was used to provide European residents and visitors with dynamic, mobile, personalized, location-based information and services, specifically related to travel and tourism in complex urban environments. The article describes the Mobility Agent and its testing and evaluation, most notably issues surrounding user acceptance, and the demand for and willingness to pay for such a product. Findings show high levels of acceptance of the Mobility Agent. Willingness to pay, especially in unfamiliar environments, is also seen to exist.

This paper presents a service based mobile application that assists tourists traveling to a country. The application provides tourists with context-aware information adapted to their personalized requirements. Detecting the real needs of the tourist is based on context management which is a key element in our system – Murshid. Advice to tourists is proposed after sensing the context and a fine analysis of its ingredients. Murshid is designed as client-server architecture and it uses GPS based location to provide a visual aid using UAE map. Murshid is flexible, user-friendly, portable, and support dynamic information. The application offers a set of services to tourists through their mobile handsets, namely: special event notification, sightseeing, weather forecasting, currency exchange, language translation, and location bookmarking and sharing. Each of the services recommends tourism guidance according to the user's context that is constantly changing since we are dealing with ...

Applications for mobile devices have some restrictions because of the limited capabilities and heterogeneity of these devices. However, their communication capabilities allow the distribution of the application control and access to information in a network. If we also consider the changing environment when a user moves from one location to another, we should have software that is context-aware and able to adapt to new situations. Agent technology can support these requirements because of its distributed nature and the ability to combine flexible component architectures, some of them with planning and learning capabilities, which are appropriate for adapting to changing environments. In this paper we show one such application, a mobile tourist guide service, which has been built as a multi-agent system, where some agents are deliberative and combine the Beliefs-Desires-Intentions approach with learning capabilities of Case Base Reasoning techniques.

2020

The development of technology experienced very rapid growth. One of the benefits of this is the use of smart phones that are widely used by the public in making it easier to carry out daily activities. the purpose of our research is to promote tourism to the outside world by utilizing smart cellphones as a platform for its introduction. The tourism we introduce is Madura Island, which is one of Indonesia's islands. Similar to its island name, Madura is inhabited by Madurese with a population of around 20 million. Madura consists of four districts including Bangkalan, Sampang, Pamekasan, and Sumenep. However, not many Indonesians and foreigners explore this island. This makes tourism in Madura still not widely known and enjoyed. Besides tourism, we also add culinary features in our application so that visitors can enjoy tourism as well as culinary in Madura. We develop smart applications based on mobile with navigation guidance to users. Hopefully, the user is facilitated during a visit to Madura in making traveling easy and fun.

Journal of Physics: Conference Series, 2020

Pekanbaru City is a place that has a huge tourism potential. Pekanbaru is very strong with the Malay culture that is proven that Pekanbaru has many Malay style tourism buildings. The culture of Pekanbaru city has different attraction for tourists. Various information about tourism developments, supporting facilities, tourism objects, visitor information about the locals is important information to know. However, many unknown places are worth a visit but people do not know about their existence, because of the lack of public information. The purpose of this research is to design an application on an Android smartphone for Tour Guide Pekanbaru. The system will use GPS to find the user point and can provide information about tourist attractions, hotels, restaurants and shopping so that they can use the time in Pekanbaru effectively. The recommendation would be to use the neighboring K-nearby algorithm (KNN) to determine the closest place. The result of this tour guide is the user can d...

Global Hospitality and Tourism Management Technologies , 2011