OPPORTUNITIES AND PROSPECTS FOR USING NAVIGATION APPLICATIONS IN GUIDED TOURS

Abstract

Geoinformation technologies have been widely used in the field of tourism to solve a variety of problems, including tourism and recreational design and in the design process of tourism products. In the last decade, navigation applications have become widespread and have been actively used in tourism. Unlike instructor guides, tour guides use them much less often. Meanwhile, a possible option for providing additional free services to clients to attract attention to a particular tourism product and promote it could be to provide tourists with GPS tracks of routes for each day of the tour, indicating points of departure and arrival, meals, and stops for inspection of objects tourist visit. The purpose of this study is to identify the possibilities and prospects for using navigation applications in sightseeing tours.

The study was conducted based on the results of a questionnaire survey of tourists, which showed that respondents, most of whom were over 35 years old, usually had experience using navigation applications (Yandex maps, 2GIS, and Google Maps). But tourists (with rare exceptions) turned out to be ‘technically’ not prepared to use applications with functionality to familiarize themselves with the tracks of the tour routes. At the same time, most of them showed interest in receiving tracks of the main tour routes from the guide.

Therefore, providing tourists with GPS tracks of routes is possible, but it requires the guide not only to create and provide the tracks themselves, but also to advise tourists about installing applications on their devices that allow them to import tracks and work offline. And tourists must be prepared (or be prepared by a guide) not only to express a desire to receive tracks, but also to spend time and space on their device to install a new navigation application for them. Considering that, according to the survey results, the Maps.me navigation application is relatively well known to tourists, and, in addition, that this service is free, relatively affordable to install, easy to use, and takes up little space in the device memory, it is proposed to recommend it to tourists it is used to import GPS tracks of the main tour routes.