Exploitable results
The PALIO is an annual horse race in Siena drawing thousands of tourists from across Europe. Hotels are packed, tourist offices crowded and public transport disrupted. Visitors to this Italian city - like those to any city or tourist destination - can easily become disorientated, not knowing how to find a hotel or the right bus into the city. Fortunately PALIO is also an IST project that aims to ensure tourists always know where they are and where they're going.
Developed by a consortium of ten companies, research organisations and local administrations from four EU countries and tested in Siena and on the Greek island of Crete earlier this year, the PALIO system offers real-time access to tourist information from anywhere, anytime.
Need a hotel? PALIO can check for vacancies over a mobile phone. Need information on a museum? PALIO can provide it on a PDA. Need travel times or bus routes? Hook up to the system from a laptop with wireless access or from a fixed terminal in a tourist office.
Adaptable and flexible
The seamless integration of mobile and fixed-line telecommunications infrastructures is one of PALIO's principal achievements, which adapts content to users' technological and personal requirements while learning their preferences and continually providing them with the most personalised and suitable information. Designed so far to support Italian, English and Greek, new languages can easily be added due to the system's open architecture built around the 'Augmented Virtual City' - a user-friendly digital access point to the tourist destination's services, information and databases.
Using the well-deployed GSM and GPRS mobile infrastructures or the global positioning system (GPS), PALIO is location aware, ensuring that information relates to a user's position in a city or tourist resort. The high adaptability of its design will also allow PALIO to operate on UMTS once the third-generation mobile network becomes widely available.
"This level of adaptability and location awareness is what makes PALIO so beneficial to tourists and differentiates it from other tourist services on offer," says project manager Paolo Zampi of Assioma, the Italian coordinator of the project. Indeed, tourist offices are only open for certain hours of the day, telephone services tend to be specific to certain areas of interest and guidebooks rapidly go out of date. PALIO on the other hand is available 24/7, provides all tourist-related information and is accurate up to the minute.
Trial user satisfaction
The trials carried out in Siena, in which 48 participants of varying ages and technological experience were let loose around the city armed with a mobile phone, a PDA or a laptop computer, prove the high level of potential interest in such a system. Each trial participant was ordered to find either a hotel or tourist attraction, and more than 90 per cent said they found PALIO useful in doing so.
By registering with the PALIO system users are offered the ability to search for the information they need, which is constantly updated in the case of continuously changing data such as hotel vacancies, traffic conditions or the weather. In addition, they can use the location awareness function to programme the system to automatically provide them with content on sites of interest in their immediate vicinity as they move around the city.
Most significantly, however, approximately nine out of ten trial users of PALIO said they would be willing to pay to use the system. This opens up a broad panorama of potential commercial applications: mobile operators could add a PALIO-style system as value-added content, tourism organisations could exploit its services, or public administrations could use it to better serve visitors to their city or region.
Public administrations especially have shown a high degree of interest in the system, which according to the project's estimates is able to lower costs related to providing 'traditional' tourist services by reducing demand for one-to-one communication in tourist offices and call centres. In addition, the high adaptability of the system architecture makes it apt for providing services not necessarily related to tourism, including community information for local residents.
"Each component of the PALIO system by itself constitutes a stand-alone module of high industrial potential," the project notes in its final report, while "the unique collection of the different characteristics and features is of significant industrial interest."
To that end the ten project partners aim to continue the development of PALIO and eventually commercialise the product either directly or through a third party such as a mobile operator.
"Our hope is that this system will eventually be set up in numerous European cities," Zampi notes, "we are looking first at Italy, then Greece and then elsewhere."
At that point PALIO will benefit tourists visiting not just Siena's famous horse race, but also other cultural and historical events in cities across the continent.
Source: Based on information from PALIO
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