Source: TRANXECUTE, INC. submitted to NRP
VIRTUAL TOURISM OFFICE: USING TECHNOLOGY TO PROMOTE RURAL TOURISM AND INTELLIGENTLY CROSS-MARKET LOCAL PRODUCTS AND SERVICES
Sponsoring Institution
National Institute of Food and Agriculture
Project Status
COMPLETE
Funding Source
SMALL BUSINESS GRANT
Reporting Frequency
Annual
Accession No.
0206551
Grant No.
2006-33610-16779
Cumulative Award Amt.
(N/A)
Proposal No.
2006-00353
Multistate No.
(N/A)
Project Start Date
May 1, 2006
Project End Date
Dec 31, 2006
Grant Year
2006
Program Code
[8.6]- (N/A)
Recipient Organization
TRANXECUTE, INC.
1009 ARCH STREET, 2ND FLOOR
PHILADELPHIA,PA 19107
Performing Department
(N/A)
Non Technical Summary
The steady decline of natural resource-based industries has posed some significant challenges to the sustainability of rural America. Many rural communities have turned to tourism as a solution for their economic revitalization. The Internet offers an ideal tool for the promotion of tourism. However, its full potential has yet to be realized by rural tourism communities. The goal of the Phase 1 R&D effort is to develop a proof-of-concept prototype which will demonstrate the technical merit and feasibility of the proposed Virtual Tourism Office software.
Animal Health Component
100%
Research Effort Categories
Basic
(N/A)
Applied
100%
Developmental
(N/A)
Classification

Knowledge Area (KA)Subject of Investigation (SOI)Field of Science (FOS)Percent
60462303030100%
Knowledge Area
604 - Marketing and Distribution Practices;

Subject Of Investigation
6230 - Marketing systems and sectors thereof;

Field Of Science
3030 - Information and communication;
Goals / Objectives
The steady decline of natural resource-based industries has posed some significant challenges to the sustainability of rural America. Many rural communities have turned to tourism as a solution for their economic revitalization. The Internet offers an ideal tool for the promotion of tourism. However, its full potential has yet to be realized by rural tourism communities. Most tourism promotion websites of rural communities are nothing more than a directory of hyperlinks to other scattered websites. As a result, not only is a potential tourist burdened with having to go through more than one website to plan his/her trip to a rural destination, but many valuable cross-marketing opportunities are also lost in this web of incongruent Internet sites. TranXecutes Virtual Tourism Office will address the limitations of current Web-based tourism promotion technologies by incorporating a layer of artificial intelligence which can astutely cross-market products and services listed on different websites. Moreover, using multiple user-specified criteria, this layer of artificial intelligence will also be able to simultaneously execute different tasks to generate a customized travel itinerary in one single step, thereby eliminating the need for potential tourists to visit a series of websites just to plan for their trips.
Project Methods
All of this will be accomplished by employing a hub and spokes layout, with an intelligent central website supported by a back-end Relational Database Management System acting as the hub, and numerous individual websites belonging to rural businesses catering to tourists acting as the spokes.

Progress 05/01/06 to 12/31/06

Outputs
We have successfully created a proof-of-concept prototype demonstrating the technical merit and feasiblity of the proposed Virtual Tourism Office (VTO) application. We established 4 major objectives to achieve at the start of the project: 1. Create a simple online web interfact that is easy to access and use by rural tourism service providers to establish an online presence 2. Create a comprehensive and customized itinerary via a front-end central website using multiple user-specified criteria 3. Building VTO with open Application Programming Interfaces (API) for easy integration with third-party information services 4. Using third-party information in combination with data contained in VTO to intelligently cross-promote rural businesses and generate a complete and customized travel itinerary. All four objectives have been successfully completed, and no major unanticipated outcomes or problems were encountered.

Impacts
The expected impact of this Virtual Tourism Office (VTO) application are two-fold: 1. For rural tourism service providers, the VTO application is expected to increase the number of tourists and boost tourism-related revenue. 2. For potential tourists, the VTO application will greatly enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of their trip planning, creating customized travel itineraries that meet their needs.

Publications

  • No publications reported this period