On-Foot Content Tourism Support System in Urban Tourist Destinations of Japan

Abstract

It has also become possible for people to easily acquire tourism information that matches their own particular tastes using the internet, so tourism has taken a more diverse range of forms. One of these is “content tourism” that became popular in recent Japan. Sgains such a backdrop, the present study aimed to design, develop, operate and evaluate a system that integrated three subsidiary systems including Web-geographic information systems (GIS), a tourism information system and social networking service (SNS) in order to support walking-based content tourism. This made it possible to create sightseeing routes and to submit, store, and view tourist attraction information. Additionally, the system was operated for one month in Chofu City, Tokyo Metropolis, and the total number of users was 42. During the operation period, 12 new sightseeing routes were created and 30 new tourist attractions were submitted. Based on the results of the web questionnaire survey, users highly evaluated the key functions of the system and the overall system. However, of those key functions, evaluations were somewhat low for the ease of operation of the creation function of sightseeing route, so the improvements must be made. From the results of the access log analysis of users’ log data, the total number of sessions in this system was 134, 64% used PCs, 36% used mobile devices, Therefore, the approach of designing the system such that the same functions could be used regardless of the type of device one is using was an effective design approach.