Contextual Flow of Information in Tourism using BLE Proximity Detection to Enhance the Tourism Experience

Abstract

The IoT represents a great opportunity for tourism and hospitality to increase customer satisfaction while simulta-neously reducing operational costs. Smart tourism involves using smart technology and practices to boost resource management and the sustainability of tourism, while growing the overall competitiveness. Travel and tourism companies will depend on IoT technology to create an array of benefits both in internal and external environments. Through our study, we explore BLE beacon based proximity detection and information delivery, and its various use cases to overcome the complications of the travel and tourism industry. As the key technology, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons are deployed at the core of our model along with a front-end application that interacts with the beacons to personalize and satisfy the tourists' demands. By combining smartphone capabilities with beacon technology, messages can be sent to tourists at the point they are most relevant, based on their proximity to the beacon. This would be especially effective on walking tours around a city. When tourists walk past a site of historical or ideological importance, an ancient ruin for example, they can be sent prompts or messages which describe what they are seeing and what it means in terms of the destination's history or culture. Our implementation emulates a tourist scenario enabled by BLE beacons and cloud resources using our experimental model. Moreover, we examine the practical implications about the role and use of IoT in tourism which should enable the industry to keep up with global tourism trends and put them on an equal footing with other participants in the online tourism and travel market.