A Tourism Information Service for Safety During School Trips

In this chapter, we propose a tourism information service for student school trips that provides the current position of students and a history of movement during their trips for typical situations and helps students to move quickly to evacuation areas in the event of a disaster. The number of students that go on school trips in Japan is approximately three million per year. This is one of the largest group trip segments in the Japanese travel market. Students typically go on school trips during the third year of junior high school and also during the second year of senior high school. Since the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011, teachers and travel agencies are now required to ensure the security of students during school trips. However, the dedicated disaster information system is not useful for this purpose when a disaster occurs. There is a need for a system that is designed both for typical situations and also for disaster situations. An application system for tourists is suitable for a dual-purpose mission like this. We designed and implemented a tourism information system that consists of (1) a smartphone application that captures the students’ current position via GPS, (2) a server application that receives and accumulates the position information and provides the current position and a history of movement to the teachers, and (3) an additional application module that communicates information to the students about the evacuation area and the evacuation route in the event of a disaster and also provides direct verbal communication via IP phone. We have conducted field experiments in the Kyoto area and have received positive feedback from school teachers and travel agencies.