European Tourist Destinations Portal

Last update: 04/2005

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What is European Tourist Destinations Portal?
Objectives
How does it work?
Achievements
Who benefits?
The role of IDA(BC)
Technical information
Documentation

What is the European Tourist Destinations Portal?

Most of the information on European tourist destinations is currently produced by national tourist offices (NTOs). Each country has developed its own website with little harmonisation between sites as to content, design or navigation tools. At present, the European traveller has to visit several different national sites to gather information for any multi-country trip. This project is developing a European portal to provide a single entry point giving access to all European public tourism information. Once operational, the portal will be run by European Travel Commission (ETC) using its http://www.visiteurope.com/ URL. Today this web site is limited to a welcome page containing general information about Europe (focussing on travellers coming from third countries, like US) and a list of pointers to the existing national sites.

The new European portal will be user centred offering a dialogue in six European languages (English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish) and three non European languages (Russian, Chinese and Japanese). The portal will include practical information about Europe, like travel planning (transportation, weather, calendar) or recommendations on “where to go” and “what to do”. Destinations information will be organised by themes (sport, culture, gastronomy, specific events, etc.) and a first level of information about all European destinations will be available directly on the portal. For more detailed information (hotels, restaurants, etc) the user will be sent to national web sites. The European Tourist Destination Portal is not aiming at replacing national web sites, but on the contrary, it should facilitate and increase the number of visitors on these national sites by an easier access and a higher level of user interface.

In addition to provide a better visibility to the user on all the European tourism information available, the portal will offer to the national tourism organisations a tool for an increased cooperation, and boost the promotion of European tourist destinations. The user interface will take into account the recommendations for World Wide Web services on the requirements for users with disabilities and special needs, WAI ( Web Accessibility Initiative).

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Objectives

The portal aims to address the needs of both tourists originating from outside and within Europe and to contribute towards making European destinations more attractive and easily accessible, thus ensuring Europe’s share of global travel.

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How does it work?

The project is based on a two steps approach: the first 8 months has been dedicated to design and specification, the second phase of 10 months (ending in October 2005) is now aiming at the implementation of the service.

The first phase has been completed (end 2004). It was based on 3 main tasks: first, evaluate the existing national web sites, in particular with the view to improving their interoperability, second, specify the user interface and portal services and third, identify the results available from the research and IDA projects to produce a portal making the best use of the most advanced European technologies.

Each NTO was involved during the initial stages to evaluate the existing 33 European NTO sites individually, looking in particular at their database content in view of being included in the European tourism information network. The existing web services and content was analysed following an online questionnaire resulting in the identification of obstacles, requirements and constraints and the preparation of an inventory list of technologies / approaches and list of conditions for NTO participation.

All technological and architectural decisions (with full compliance with the IDA(BC) Architecture Guidelines) have been made and the services selected. The evaluation of RTD (Research and Technological Development) projects has led to the decision to reuse the results from two research projects, Harmonise and DIETORECS

Harmonise provides a set of open source tools to extract existing information from different web sites (using different standards) and transform them into XML. It is the key component for the interoperability between national sites and the European portal. DIETORECS provides an advanced user interface based on artificial intelligence technologies to facilitate the dialogue with the user and improve the quality and the accuracy of the reply to the users’ requests.

The Commission, in charge of the project, is assisted by a steering group composed of national experts appointed by the national tourism authorities.

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Achievements

As a result of this project, comprehensive data are available for the whole of Europe in the form of an analysis of the current status of NTO database and website contents and structures and of the technologies used. A web-robot survey, visiting simultaneously 33 NTO websites, gathered further important indicators for each country.

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Who benefits?

Citizens: Travellers will benefit mainly from better, more complete information and friendlier interfaces.

Businesses: The portal will provide a strong marketing channel for European SMEs, many of whom rely on the tourist trade.

National Tourism Offices: For the NTOs, the portal will bring more traffic to their web sites and new ICT tools.

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The role of IDA(BC)

IDA provided the funding for the European Tourist Destinations Portal. In addition, IDABC provides support through the use of Horizontal Measures (HMs), such as the European Interoperability Framework and the Architecture Guidelines.

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Technical information