Academy TechNotes ATN Volume 3, Number 5, 2012

Mobile Tourism Planning Radha M De, Diptiman Dasgupta

lobal Travel & Tourism industry is expected to grow nearly 2.8% during 2012, as stated by the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC). This growth is

marginally better than the growth of the global economy (2.5% as per World Bank). To capture this kind of rapid industry growth and associated opportunities, numerous web based tourism portals are entering the market to help tourists plan their itineraries. Many of these web ap-plications are offered on mobile devices through GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) but GPRS driven mobile web applications are only just starting to provide an ef-fective user experience.

Though industries are adopting enterprise mobility and promoting mobile applications to their customers, there are still some basic limitations such as band-width constraints, device resource consumption and application speed, in comparison with desktop or laptop based applications. “Mobile Cloud Computing” is com-ing out as a quick answer to all these problems by taking a unique approach to couple cloud com-puting services with mobile de-vices. The term “Cloud Phones” is emerging as a label for the next generation, where users can get direct access to cloud-hosted applications and work with them using mobile devices. Mobile devices can utilize faster networks like 3G and 4G LTE (Long Term Evo-lution). Android-based phones are fast becoming a popular choice to provide such facilities. Now to quench the thirst of travel-loving people across the globe, the time has come to have a smart travel planner applica-tion accessed through mobile devices and hosted on cloud infrastructure. These kinds of applications are still limited in number and not yet widely adopted.

Let us now consider what a smart mobile travel planner application should look like. Those days are past when customers used to look for only static information regard-ing tourist spots like “How-To-Reach”, “Where-To-Stay”, “What-To-See” etc. In today’s scenario it is more relevant to provide a dynamic view of the locations, e.g. ranking of hotels or places, feedback on a point of interest. It is also expected that these applications should be inte-grated with popular social networks so that consumers can see the feedback from the people in real time. Not only that, these applications should also be able to re-serve hotels or book a cab and provide location based services.

To enable such applications it would be very helpful to have a concrete application development framework that supports creation of mobile phone based travel

planner applications for any chosen tourist location. Since Android based phones are popular, this can be a potential target for promulgating the mobile based tour-ism applications. Android based hybrid applications are now booming. Hybrid applications provide the flavor of native mobile application features along with ease of standard web based application development and inte-gration to a backend enterprise infrastructure bringing up real-time information from servers. This amalgamation is becoming extremely popular for mobile application im-plementations as it exploits the features of the mobile phone, while at the same time can bring up and send back real-time information from and to the backend en-terprise application infrastructure. The Hybrid application

can be developed using WebKit engine found in Android’s WebView engine. JavaScript, JSON can be used to take care of communication with the backend web application infra-structure. This brings the feel of a native mobile application along with fast data communication with backend systems. There are various potential benefits of this kind of travel planner and some of them are as below:

1. Easy way to design travel planner for any tourist spot: Easy tailoring of the same for any chosen tourist spot or a bunch of tourist spots in some state of the country. Using Web 2.0 technology to cache information in mobile set will remove the pain of latency in mobile applications and cloud based backend infrastructure.

2. Increased security and data privacy: These kinds of Hybrid applications on cloud provide inherent advan-tages of the cloud environment, like complex virus scan-ning, malware detection etc. Some of the recommended measures to enhance mobile cloud security may be en-sured with cloud access protection mechanism through secure one time password, token based user authentica-tion etc. Mobile cloud is certainly an enabler for improv-ing the security levels for applications offered on smart phones and tablets.

3. Higher acceptance among users: This mobile tour planner can bring a paradigm shift by allowing planning and alteration of an individual’s itinerary anytime from handheld devices. This should certainly reach a big population

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Radha M De, IBM Advisory Accredited IT Specialist

Diptiman Dasgupta, IBM Certified Senior IT Architect & Member of the IBM Academy of Technology

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