Grant Map EU

The main objective of the project is to develop new IT-enabled tourism products for natural and cultural heritage tourist destinations in the SBR in form of multilingual BYOD-guided tours providing an enhanced visitor experience during and after the visit thanks to gamification, multimedia content, and augmented reality techniques. The guides will provide informational and educational content to visitor’s lacking access to other types of guides due to high-season crowd or insufficient language skills, they are especially suitable for lone and cross-border travelers. The common gamification service will make the visitors’ experience more involving, and will extend it out of a single visit fostering long-term relationship. A new region-wide brand (working name: South Baltic Spotter) will be introduced to make the new gamified products better recognizable and marketable, not only making the tourist offer of the SBR more visible and coherent to visitors but also forming a sustainable cross-border network of tourist destinations using the brand, open and prepared for new members joining. The user-centric design process of the new products will involve organisation of special events during the off-season that will additionally serve promotional purposes and should bring in a new kind of visitors (IT fans) to the destinations. Both the gamified tourism products offered under a region-wide brand and the way the end-users are involved in design of tourism products are novelty in the SBR. The project outputs will directly benefit visitors to natural and cultural heritage sites in the SBR (by enhancing the tourism supply), managers of natural and cultural heritage sites (by providing solutions ready to implement and knowledge on how to do it), and indirectly managers of tourist agencies (with a new brand fostering the interest of tourists). The project will vastly contribute to increasing popularity of natural and cultural heritage sites of the SBR as tourism destinations.