Location-based Mobile Tourist Services - First User Experiences

The vision of nomadic users having seamless, worldwide access to a range of tourist services seems within reach, within only a few years from now. While much of the underlying technology is already available, there are challenges with respect to usability that need intelligent solutions. CRUMPET has realized a personalized, location-aware tourism service, implemented as a multi-agent system with a concept of service mediation and interaction facilitation. The system has been validated in terms of technical and user-perceived qualities at four European trial sites. This paper reports the findings of the user validation and draws conclusions concerning mobile tourism services.