by Niels C. Nielsen
Compiled for inclusion in the final report from the EU Interreg project "ToLearn", see www.tolearn.info
The area of interest for this study is a popular tourist destination, an island off the Danish West coast, having more... more
The area of interest for this study is a popular tourist destination, an island off the Danish West coast, having more than 1 million overnight stays yearly, mostly in summer cottages and on camping grounds. The main attraction of the island is the wide beach and tracts relatively unspoilt nature. Local and regional authorities and tourist business operators are trying to expand the season from summer into the shoulder seasons and widen the range of attractions to include among others art, music, gastronomy and watching of seals and birds.
The island, having an area of 57km2 and 3200 inhabitants constitutes a separate municipality, with the possibility of having its own public service, land use and tourism policy. Within the framework of the local ”agenda 21” group, the central objective is maintaining a sustainable development allowing tourism to evolve while protecting nature and respecting the people who live year-round on the island. Meanwhile there is an ongoing process towards dedicating the Danish Wadden Sea area as National Park.
A project has recently been outlined for restoring a lake between two rows of coastal dunes, potentially home to many breeding and migrating birds. The project includes access for visitors and the set-up of an information system on animal, plants and the land use history of the coast and the southern part of the island. Our university department was approached by the Agenda group to assist with defining the user requirements and clarify the technological possibilities in setting up a wireless information system for the area around the restored lake. It should preferably be possible to access the system with normal mobile phones or phones with technology expecting to be incorporated in the near future, especially location awareness enabled through inclusion of GPS receivers, but also sounds and images of phenomena and species encountered by visitors to the area. The information system should be so flexible that it can be expanded to include larger parts or all of the proposed national park. Temporally, the mobile parts of the system should concentrate on the on-destination and on-site activities of the visitors.
The technological background survey is currently taking place within the framework of a EU-supported inter-regional project. The aim of this project is to analyse interregional and transnational learning processes in the field of tourism, thereby identifying strategies, which have proven successful in the development of sustainable tourism. We have thus identified site management and information dissimination strategies that should be feasible for the proposed project, and are currently designing ways of collecting and managing relevant information and for presentation on web sites and mobile devices. Interviews with local and regional tourism professionals have revealed a solid infrastructure for tourist information at the national level, but the information at local level is varied in density and quality, similarly the users friendliness of the systems (particularly web sites). The main challenge we thus find is to collect and mediate relavant information to be presented by the system, another challenge is to construct the system in a way that allows it to be interactively in tourist activties on the location and on-site, for instance in geocaching or treasure hunts tailored for e.g. families or schools. The Internet based part of the system should allow for user contributed content and sharing of experiences, followed vigilantly by destination and site managers as a source of visitor feedback and potential complaints (among others).
Finally, we conclude that the current case study has underlined the importance of assuring the quality and availability of relevant information along with the technical set-up of a site-based information system for visitors. A functioning multi-medial site information system can contribute positively to a destination management system. We expect this development project to contribute positively to the interregional project in which it is integrated, although the transfer of knowledge and experience exchange part of the learning process are still to take place. This learning and knowledge transfer process will be monitored closely, and subsequently evaluated and reported upon.
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