Smart Destination as Key Element

The study intends to show the business opportunities generated through the use of technology in the tourism sector by identifying its key elements, with the aim of improving the user's experience. In order to achieve this, the Way of St James has been taken as the object of analysis, given its relevance at a national level as a tourist attraction, and its impact at international level. The methodology applied uses a content analysis of the key technologies that are being used in its promotion, dissemination, information and management. The main results obtained showed that companies are not taking sufficient advantage of social media, which are a key element in user communication and feedback. It was also noted that their webpages had only basic information that was not dynamic enough, and showed an almost general lack of tools such as augmented or virtual reality, and more intuitive interfaces and applications.

From Amusement and Entertainment Tourism to Balneotherapy and Health Promotion Tourism

Since the prehistoric era, balneotherapy has been important as a folk therapy in Japan, where the greatest number of hot springs (spas) have been developed, utilized for balneotherapy, and enjoyed by many citizens in the world. In the last centuries, however, hot spring areas chose the “economic rational behavior” to convert from balneotherapy resorts to commercialized amusement and entertainment resorts for the purpose of economic development. This chapter describes this history and then casts light on the blind spots thus far ignored in one-disciplinary approaches. Using a multidisciplinary approach, this chapter views the problems in the medical, behavioral, regional and national dimensions. Then, this chapter explores the sustainable systems of balneotherapy-centered region and the strategies to reconvert hot spring resorts to balneotherapeutic resorts in the sense of modern medicine and hygiene. This chapter proposes the utilization of medical electronic apparatuses and medical communication network systems to promote medical tourism in local areas. Finally, this chapter discusses the acceptability of the strategies to the medical and local communities.

Medical Tourism Service Quality

Medical tourism, a growing phenomenon in the world today, possesses a worthwhile potential for the economic development of any country. Globalization, development of information and communication technology (ICT) and adherence to the international quality standards potentially result in a significant increase in the movement of patients and healthcare professionals across national boundaries. The demand for medical tourism in India is experiencing a tremendous growth. However, the Indian medical tourism sector faces various challenges. Since India attempts to position itself as one of the preferred global medical tourism hub, a thorough understanding of means to attract, satisfy and retain medical tourists is extremely important. Five hundred and thirty four (534) useful responses in two different phases is collected and tested to examine the validity and reliability of the scale to ensure a quantitative and statistically proven identification of the responses. The exploratory factor analysis (EFA) is used to identify the underlying dimensions of medical tourism service quality for medical tourism in India. Next, confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was used to confirm the factor structure of the constructs and validate EFA results.

Who Won the Winter 2010 Olympics?

During and at the end of Olympic games, we are always given the number of gold, silver and bronze medals won by each country and often the total number won as an indicator of the surmised winner. The groups that report the medal count in this manner indicate that they believe all medals are the same, regardless of the kind of medal involved. Perhaps one reason it is done this way is because there has not been a scientific way to assign appropriate weights to each type of medal. This paper explores use of the measurement theory, the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), to quantify the values of gold, silver and bronze medals and use these values to compute the total value of the medals won by the leading countries in order to determine which country may be considered the winner of the 21st Winter Olympics held February 12–28, 2010, in Vancouver, Canada.

Recreating the Place

The development and uptake of information and communication technologies have provided tourism industries innovative opportunities to interact with potential tourists. Instead of focusing on the development and implementation of new technological tools with which much E-tourism research is concerned, this paper examines a case of tourism promotion in Japan made possible by the spread of video-sharing websites. The case shows a nontraditional, non-intuitive strategy. It reaches potential tourists and gains nationwide visibility at a relatively low cost by producing videos featuring an unappealing character who symbolizes the destination: Hakodate City. This strategy of promoting domestic tourism was preceded by other two popular strategies of tourism promotion in Japan, and the case is compared with them: popular media-induced tourism, particularly anime tourism, and local mascots.

Film Induced Tourism

Many film locations around the world have become the pull factors for tourists to visit. The American soap opera ‘Sex and the City' is a prime example of that. Hundreds of restaurants, bars, and shops featured in the films and TV series turn out to be must-see destinations for tourists visiting different places. The Indian film named ‘Roza' has attracted a lot of tourist to visit a beautiful place in North India, named Kashmir. Recently, the tourists prefer to visit those destinations which are featured in films or movies and television series. This phenomenon is known as film induced tourism. In this paper, we propose a film induce tourism technique which can be evaluated by the mosaiced image obtained from a movie. The proposed system firstly read all the image sequences from a movie, and stitched them together such a way so that it becomes very much easier for a tourist to choose the best holiday destination from a movie or television series.

From the Museums of Objects to the Virtual Museums

This paper analyses the role played by the new multimedia technologies for the development of the offer of museums. The role of museums is changing: while in the past the goal of mere cataloguing and preservation prevailed, today these institutions are making efforts to increase the number of visitors and attract new segments of demand, as well as qualify their offer. It emerges, for all these reasons, the need to modify the positioning and the offering of cultural attractions, strengthening them in experiential terms. Therefore, in terms of management of cultural heritage it is necessary to focus on the ability to get closer to the public and to create richer and striking experiences for visitors through new technologies. The paper presents some of the most interesting cases of Italian audience-driven museums (Hopper-Greenhill, 1994) focused on innovative ITC support.

Empirical Analysis on the Medical Tourism Policy in Taiwan

“Medical Tourism” is a growing industry, attracting more and more attention. Taiwan's government, hopeful that this new industry could generate considerable revenue, has declared its ambition to become the premier choice for cross-country medical care for international visitors. The policy network approach emphasizes the interaction between policy actors. This chapter examines Taiwan's medical tourism development from the model of public policy implementation. We present findings from twelve semi-structured interviews with stakeholders across medical service providers, as well as government officers, and civil society sectors. We found that medical tourism in Taiwan is a growing service, with both public and private sector involvement. However, it is still lagging behind regional competitors such as Singapore, Thailand, and India. Thus, active efforts should be made to encourage the coordination between the medical care sector, tourism industry, and relevant authorities.

Global Medical Tourism

Medical tourism is related to the travel of patients from one country to another in order to obtain medical treatment in that country. There are several countries worldwide promoting medical tourism and attracting patients. Most of the developing nations attract the patients because of cost benefits whereas the developed nations attract patients who require complex surgeries or any kind of advanced medical treatment. The main aim of this research paper is to focus on the development of medical tourism industry, worldwide. Medical Tourism industry throughout the world is growing at a fast rate. It has huge potential for generating employment and earning large amount of foreign exchange. This will help in the country's overall economic development. Medical tourism incorporates multi-dimensional activity but basically it is a service industry. Hence, medical tourism is a vital revenue earning source especially for the developing nations. Hence, it can be said that it is a win situation for both the patients as well as the destination countries.

Interactive Approaches for Sightseeing Route Planning under Uncertain Traffic and Ambiguous Tourist's Satisfaction

This paper proposes an interactive approach to obtain an appropriate sightseeing route for the tourist under various uncertain traffic and climate conditions including time-dependent parameters and ambiguous satisfaction values at sightseeing sites. Since the uncertain traffic and climate conditions include time-dependent conditions, Time Expanded Network (TEN) are proposed for each condition. Furthermore, interval numbers for ambiguous satisfaction values are proposed, and hence, the proposed model is formulated as a multiobjective interval programming problem with many constraints derived from network optimization. In order to transform the multiobjective into the single-objective, Minkowski's Lp-metric is introduced as a compromise approach. From the final formulation of our proposed model using the optimistic satisfactory for interval numbers, an interactive algorithm to obtain the appropriate sightseeing route communicating with the tourist is developed.