A study on sightseeing promotion with ICT from the viewpoint of sustainability

Recently, interest in Japanese domestic tour has been decreasing year by year. The number of domestic trips in one year has been decreasing from 1992 to 2012. The Tourism Agency aims to promote domestic tourism for overseas people as an issue of national priority. However in Japanese sightseeing, there has been various problem in transportation. For example, there has been few information in English about not only public transportation but also bicycle/foot. Therefore most of people gather only specific typical tourism spots and famous means of transportations, and it is the cause of overcrowding on public transportations. For local residents, public transportations are irreplaceable means to move. The tourism region should improve service quality for both tourists and local residents. Concretely, developing new tourism spots and enhancing new transportation means are required. In this paper, we propose a method to distribute tourists to various kinds of transportation means by providing new tourist spots information. We develop a mobile application to enhance foot based side trip tourism, and our work aims to provide 3 kinds of benefits for improving the sustainability in tourism region: developing new tourism spots is to support regional economy, distributing transportation means is to improve regional service, and enhancing foot based tourism is to contribute global environment. The subjects we develop are the word-of-mouth information retrieval system, a mobile application, and tourist´s mobile history analysis system. Additionally in this paper, we show a tourism concierge system as the future view for wholly supporting a tourist´s hospitality.