1. INTRODUCTION
So why e-tourism is important and what benefits it brings to us? Well, as defined earlier e-tourism revolutionises all business processes covering the entire value chain as well as the strategic relationships of tourism with all stakeholder involved such as hotels, food chains, local attractions, and even the government. Let's break down some of the benefits of e-tourism.
2. SECTORS IN TOURISM INDUSTRY
A simple math here. More tourist equals to more income to tourism industry which benefits all stakeholders involved such as accommodation owners (hotels, homestays & others), food chains business such as traditional food stalls, and local businesses such as gift shops and others. This will also create job opportunities as tourism businesses grows.
2. Improve Efficiency and Effectiveness
Some traditional process can be greatly improved with e-tourism. For example, online ticketing system will provide another new channel to sell the airway tickets, or an online website can help tourist book online for their accommodation.
3. Improve Tourism Experience
Imagine software or applications developed aimed to help tourist such as travel apps, GPS-assisted maps and others. These applications can greatly provide a better tourism experience to all tourist visiting to our country.
4. Improve Malaysian's Exposure
I had a few friends abroad who did not know Malaysia existed at all. With e-tourism, we can improve global awareness to the whole world on how awesome Malaysia is as we have many interesting tourist locations. We can promote with online channels such as websites, travel blogs, and even the use of online marketing to help increase Malaysian's tourism exposure.
Tourist accommodation is a type of residential accommodation for tourists who travel and needed a place for basic necessity needs such as sleep, rest, shelter, safety, storage of luggage and some common household needs such as bathing and others. Example of tourist accommodations are hotels, homestays, boarding house, chalets, and even in some cases house/room rent. Depending on the location and period of stay, tourist may lodge to any of these accommodations to fulfil their basic needs as mentioned.
a. Provide websites to cater online room/facility booking for tourists
b. Room/Facility availability are easily manageable by web-based system.
c. Promote the accommodation to tourist over the internet instead of the traditional approach whereby marketing is mainly done via distribution of pamphlets, brochures, and others.
The food and beverage sector are one of the most important sectors within tourism. As tourist travels far from their homes, most of them desires to try our local food as they intend to experience other culture's food. Some of our popular traditional foods such as "Nasi Lemak", "Keropok Lekor" and others are among the popular food hunt by these tourists. Most tourist visiting Malaysia will definitely have commented that our food are awesome compared to others. Food and beverage has become one of the best highlights for tourists visiting to Malaysia. However, sadly to say there are some other good food that does not have good exposures towards these tourists. Food such as "Nasi Dagang", "Nasi Kerabu", "Kuih Akok", "Bingka" and others are normally not known to tourist due to lack of exposure. They might need to further journey towards villages area to experience these foods.
With e-tourism in place, we can help further promote and provide better exposure for these traditional foods. This can be done by developing online website to promote these foods, or hotel industries should be adopting this type of foods to their food menu as well. Other than that, e-tourism helps to provide some details on these foods such as type of ingredients used for the food, user review and others. This reviews and details help the tourist to understand better on the food and should they desire for it, they can go on the lookout for the food.
Besides being a marketing tool for the tourists, e-tourism also will help food and beverage businesses in terms of food management, enhancing distribution of the food and others. Application and software can be developed to cater these requirements to help improve in the food and beverages industry.
The food and beverage sector are one of the most important sectors within tourism. As tourist travels far from their homes, most of them desires to try our local food as they intend to experience other culture's food. Some of our popular traditional foods such as "Nasi Lemak", "Keropok Lekor" and others are among the popular food hunt by these tourists. Most tourist visiting Malaysia will definitely have commented that our food are awesome compared to others. Food and beverage has become one of the best highlights for tourists visiting to Malaysia. However, sadly to say there are some other good food that does not have good exposures towards these tourists. Food such as "Nasi Dagang", "Nasi Kerabu", "Kuih Akok", "Bingka" and others are normally not known to tourist due to lack of exposure. They might need to further journey towards villages area to experience these foods.
With e-tourism in place, we can help further promote and provide better exposure for these traditional foods. This can be done by developing online website to promote these foods, or hotel industries should be adopting this type of foods to their food menu as well. Other than that, e-tourism helps to provide some details on these foods such as type of ingredients used for the food, user review and others. This reviews and details help the tourist to understand better on the food and should they desire for it, they can go on the lookout for the food.
Besides being a marketing tool for the tourists, e-tourism also will help food and beverage businesses in terms of food management, enhancing distribution of the food and others. Application and software can be developed to cater these requirements to help improve in the food and beverages industry.
Recreational and Entertainment services such as zoos, museums, stadiums, theatres, amusement parks, heritage sites, fishing zone, and others are one of the vital tourism sector as these facilities are often the main reason why tourist come here in the first place. For example, back in the year 1998, Malaysia received high amount of tourists visiting Malaysia as it was the year our Petronas Twin Tower was opened as it holds the records for being the tallest twin tower in the world. As I recall, there was even a Hollywood movie being produced using the Petronas Twin Tower as one of the action scenes.
E-tourism greatly helps in modernisation our recreational and entertainment services greatly. For example, our stadiums, theatres, shopping complexes are all equipped with modern facilities with huge plasma display, 3D animations rendered to promotes our recreational facilities and others.
Transportation services includes airlines, bus companies, taxi companies, ferry services, cruise ships, trains and others. Transportation helps tourist to travel from their origin country to ours, and travel locally here either by busses, ferries, taxis and others. It helps to get them move from point A to point B. With e-tourism, tourists can make use of an online GPS-assisted system such as Google Maps and others to help them plan their journey and their mode of travel. Besides that, airlines ticket can also be purchased online nowadays with ease.
Tourism plays a very important role in Malaysia economy especially now since our current economy have suffered a massive fall in our currency values. With the Ringgit value dropped greatly now, it is vital that we take great initiatives to focus towards improving our local tourism industry as now is the perfect time for that. Low currency value surely attracts tourists and at the same time this will also help strengthen our economy.
3. MULTIMEDIA APPLICATIONS IN TOURISM INDUSTRY
In today's world, tourism industry focuses more on the information-oriented, knowledge-driven approach for their daily processes and these are automated around the internet. The internet which hosts most of multimedia contents has provided tremendous potential for remote integration and collaboration between business applications. With such integration, it creates a channel between these entities thus improving not only communication processes, but business as well.
1. Online Web Applications
Web applications are online web sites available globally to everyone and these websites are developed specifically catered for Malaysian tourism industry.
I am proposing to setup a one stop web application solutions specifically designed to help tourist to plan their journey through the use of internet. This website will feature rich multimedia contents such as tourism image galleries, video galleries and others.
Referring to the diagram above, when a tourist first visited the website, they will be prompted to select which tourism location. Once selected, then information about the location will be presented to the user. He or she can learn more about the location by also viewing some of the images and videos uploaded to the gallery, showcasing the highlights of the location.
Once the tourist really interested with the location, they can proceed with the next step which is to arrange their travel arrangement such as book an online airline ticket and look for accommodation. The website should have integration and collaboration with all the major airlines supported in the location. This will allow the tourist to study, compare, plan and book their airlines ticket accordingly on the website.
At the same time, tourists also can survey suitable accommodation for their stay in their preferred location. This also requires collaboration and integration with all of the local hotels, chalets, homestays and others. The collaboration works might take a longer time to establish especially in the rural areas as we need to get in touch with them to setup the integration. Once all have been setup accordingly, this will provide a communication bridge between the tourist and the accommodation facilitator. Our online website should also host image galleries for these accommodation which should be provided by the accommodation facilitator. At the same time, tourist will also be able to read reviews by other tourists regarding the accommodation.
2. Mobile Applications
In today's world, everyone owns a smartphone. I believe almost 97% of total population owns a smartphone. Smartphone greatly helps improve our day to day activities as smartphone becomes the source of information nowadays.
With that being said, under our main website we will create a link for the user to download our mobile apps for their smartphones. These mobile apps will provide with the following features:
a. GPS-Assisted Tour Guide
With GPS-enabled smartphones, tourists can use the apps to determine where they are now, and how to reach to their destination. It helps the tourist to navigate through their tourism spots
b. Integrated Web Application
Integrated with our main tourism websites, mobile apps also provide the same detailed information such as location information, image and video galleries. At the same time, tourist can also do online booking, or airline reservation with our mobile apps.
c. Virtual Tours
Utilising the new Virtual Reality Modelling Language (VRML) system, the mobile apps able to deliver virtual tours of the selected location. Imagine being able to virtually visit the preferred tourism spot by just navigating from your mobile phone. For example, if a tourist wishes to preview the location Pulau Tioman, he or she can use the mobile apps to have a quick virtual tour navigating through the Pulau Tioman. The content will be fully rendered in 3D animation.
3. Multimedia Kiosks
One of the challenges faced by the tourist is the lack of help or assistance should they need one. Why? This is simply because of the communication language barrier. Imagine tourist from Japan visiting Kuala Lumpur, and they have a hard time to find help since they can't communicate with either Bahasa Malaysia or English. Multimedia Kiosks can help these tourists. These kiosks will host all the information such as:
a. Tour Guide Map with Way Finder function
b. Multi-Language feature
c. Information about the current location
d. Public transport availability and schedule
e. Traffic information
f. Weather information
g. Multimedia contents such as Image and Video galleries
h. Location of the Recreational and Entertainment Areas
i. Emergency Contact Numbers
j. And many more
Multimedia kiosks will be placed at the tourist spots such as hotels, recreational parks and attractions, convention centres, and others. This will definitely provide and ease of access for these tourists.
4. MULTIMEDIA HARDWARE SPECIFICATIONS
In this section, I will be discussing on the hardware requirement for the proposed multimedia applications for tourism earlier. Without the hardware, there is no way we can deliver the content by itself.
1. Online Web Applications
For online web application, first and foremost we need to setup a web server. First, we need to purchase or rent a physical server. As we are hosting a website with rich multimedia contents, it is very important to get server specification that is able to deliver these multimedia contents, and at the same time we also need great data bandwidth with minimum of 100 Mbps.
Next, we need to install some of the required component such as Operating System, web server such as Apache, IIS, Tomcat or others, and a database system to store all data. As we intend to develop the application using Microsoft Visual Studio, therefore we will be using Microsoft based specifications such as Ms SQL Server, Dot Net Framework and others.
Below are details of the web server specifications.
Processor: Intel Quad Core Xeon E3
Ram: 32Gb DDR3
Hard Drive: 2TB SATA Enterprise (with redundancy hard drive)
Bandwidth: AIMS Data Centre 100Mbps with 2 Dedicated Fixed IP
Operating System: Windows Server 2012
Web Server: IIS8 (preinstalled with Windows Server 2012)
2. Mobile Applications
For mobile application, we plan to develop apps targeted for all three common platforms which is IOS, Android and Windows Phone. For the apps development, we will be using the Android Studio (formerly known as Eclipse) Integrated Development Editor (IDE) to write the program. Once done, we will be using converter to make it compatible with other platform such as IOS and Windows Phone. However, for Windows Phone we might need to install additional IDE which is Ms Visual Studio for Mobile Development.
For mobile apps publishing, we will be using the common channel which is Apple Appstore for IOS based devices, Google Playstore for Android based devices and Microsoft Store for Windows Phone devices. We will also publish the installer file directly on our main web application as well.
Below are details of the mobile application specifications.
Programming Language: C#
Android Devices: Android Studio SDK
IOS Devices: Xamarin Studio SDK.
Windows Devices: Ms Visual Studio 2015 Ultimate
Android Devices: Google Play Store
IOS Devices: Apple AppStore
Windows Devices: Microsoft Store
Other: Direct download from website
3. Multimedia Kiosks
The proposed tourism kiosks system will have a dynamic content as these contents are regularly updated such as weather information. Therefore, it is better to have a centralise database instead of inputting these data into each kiosk. Refer diagram below for further details on how the data traverse.
As per illustration above, it shows that the kiosks will generally does not have any database stored within itself as information are retrieved from other source of database such as weather database, traffic database and even connecting to our own database. Data are being pulled by the use of internet connection from the kiosks.
With that being said, the kiosk hardware specification does not need to be a server setup, but instead a minimal hardware setup just enough to display the required data on the display.
As for the kiosk's software, we will develop the software using the Open Kiosk system by Mordez Group Inc as this is a free open source kiosk system. We will use the open source system and fully customize the system to cater to our business needs.
Below are hardware specification details for the tourism multimedia kiosks:
Processor: Intel I3 6th Generation Processor
Ram: 4Gb DDR3
Display: Intel HD Integrated Display
Hard Drive: 500Gb SATA Hard Drive
Sound: Integrated VIA Audio System
Monitor: 15inch Touch Screen LCD
Connectivity: Intel Integrated Ethernet Network Interface Card (NIC)
Kiosk Physical Design: Eidos Based Design. Free-standing DDA kiosk.
Operating System: Windows 7 Home Basic
Kiosk System: Open Kiosk System by Mordez Group Inc.
5. CONCLUSION
Nowadays, the business volume of tourism surpasses income coming from oil exports, based on the distributed statistics by MOTAC. Tourism has proven to be a catalyst for development and these dynamics have turned the industry into a key-driver for economic growth, especially today as we currently suffered with massive drop in our Ringgit value.
According to Tourism and Culture Minister Datuk Seri Nazri Aziz, the Government's strong support in recognising tourism as an important economic driver as well as the concerted efforts of the country's trade and media partners to market and brand Malaysia made the country the most preferred tourist destination which has contributed to this achievement. With that being said, it is vital to look into enhancing our economic tourism growth.
The future of tourism organisations and enterprises will be a more information-oriented, knowledge-driven and much of their daily processes will be automated around the internet. Tourist nowadays are more self-reliant, and prefer self-service facilities such as assessing information via websites, online reservation at the ease of a fingertip touch on a mobile phone, and get help and assistance through a self-service multimedia kiosks terminal. This will be the new era, the era of information age, and e-tourism certainly needs to be fully utilise in today's world.
Prof Dr Mansor Fadzil, Prof Dr Nantha Kumar Subramaniam. (2013). CBMT2013 Introduction to Multimedia (First Edition). Malaysia: Open University Malaysia.
References
Tourism Malaysia | Malaysia Tourism Statistic in Brief. Retrieved March, 2016, from http://www.tourism.gov.my/statistics
Discover Tourism Canada. Industry Information. Retrieved March 20, 2016, from http://discovertourism.ca/en/about_tourism/industry_information
The Star Online. Giving the Tourism Sector a Boost. Retrieved March 20, 2016, from http://www.thestar.com.my/news/nation/2013/08/15/giving-the-tourism-sector-a-boost/
Wikipedia. Lodging. Retrieved March 20, 2016, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lodging
Open Kiosks, Complete Distribution. Retrieved March 20, 2016 from http://openkiosk.mozdevgroup.com/
International Journal of Virtual Technology and Multimedia Archive Volume 1 Issue 2, March 2010
E-Tourism. Definition of E-Tourism. Retrieved March 20, 2016. Retrieved from http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~pszqiu/Teaching/G53DDB/E-Tourism%20Lecture%20120310.pptx
Few years back, i was given an assignment paper for my studies on Introduction to Multimedia. The assignment paper was about an in-depth discussion about Electronic Tourism in Malaysia. I have decided to publish my written articles here after one year from the assignment date. This is due to avoid any plagiarism issues that i might encountered if i publish this earlier than that.
You may download the published assignment paper here.
