Tourist Office Counselling Service

Abstract

In an ongoing R & D project, the authors investigate the consultation situations of travel counselling in travel agencies and tourist offices at destinations. The first investigations described in this paper indicate more similarities than differences between these two situations. The design requirements for collaborative co-located travel counselling from previous work describe a reformulation of the consultation situation to a joint problem-solving one. Since this procedure was confirmed and the requirements development for tourist offices revealed similar needs, the authors decided to implement design requirements of co-located travel counselling to a prototype system for supporting a collaborative tourist office counselling situation. Initial results of a first proof-of-concept field study look promising for further work in this direction, as they enrich the situation with further problem-solving capabilities to the advantage of both customers and tourist office personnel.