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Web and mobile based tourist travel guide system for Fiji's tourism industry

Conference Paper · March 2015

DOI: 10.1109/APWCCSE.2014.7053840

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 Web and Mobile based Tourist Travel Guide System
for Fiji's Tourism Industry
Vineet Singh, Akeshnil Bali, Avinesh Adhikthikar, Rohitash Chandra
School of Computing Science, Information System and Mathematics,
The University of the South Pacific,
Laucala Bay, Suva, Fiji
singh_vn@usp.ac.fj, bali_a@usp.ac.fj, adhikthikar_a@eclipse.fj, and chandra_ro@usp.ac.fj
Abstract – The tourism sector is leading Fiji’s Economy.
There are limited technologies used in this sector to address the
number of problems faced by the tourists travelling to Fiji. Some
of these are bookings for accommodation, retrieving information
about different activities in the country, navigation to tourist
spots, translation to indigenous Fijian language and access to
information on the weather. Tourists also face problems in
finding all the tools available in a single application as most of the
services are not embedded in a centralized platform. This paper
presents a tourism information system that gives a centralized
tourist travel guide system for Fiji where a number of services
are available. Our proposed system is a centralized system based
on web services which provides all necessary information and
tools that can be used by tourists to organize their trip. A
prototype of the mobile application that demonstrates the
proposed system is implemented and tested in order to guide
further developments in this area.
Keywords – Tourism information systems, Centralized
systems, Web services, Responsive websites, Android application
I. INTRODUCTION
The tourism sector of Fiji is the largest gross foreign
exchange earner and contributes substantially to employment
and a major driver in Fiji’s growth. There are more than 250
hotels and 50 resorts in Fiji which are not linked to a generic
website where tourists are able to use the website to plan their
trip [1]. Although tourists have access to large amount of
travel-related information on the Internet, planning the actual
trip requires lots of work and turns to be rather difficult [2].
The mobile phone plays an important role in the tourism
industry. Tourists, typically carry smart-phones and tablets
which are more useful than their personal computers. Tourists
need to visit various sites to retrieve different information such
as booking for accommodation and transportation, which
requires a lot of effort [2]. Since the information needed is
given in different websites, tourist find it difficult to compare
and choose the best option, for example, selecting between
different hotels based on the user’s requirement is a difficult
task. There are websites that compare different travel rates
and accommodation services along with reviews from
customers [3] [4], however, they do not accurately index all
the hotels in Fiji, especially the smaller or less popular ones.
In the past decade, there have been numerous attempts to
apply technology to the travel services and the pervasive
problems of information overloads [5, 6, and 7]. We have
1
IOS is a mobile operating system developed by Apple Inc.
discovered some active system but they are limited in scope [8
and 9]. These systems are working but with separate services,
therefore the tourists still have to use multiple applications.
Tourists need access to information wherever and whenever
they want to organize their trip, making tourism a perfect
application field for web and mobile computing [11]. Latest
generations of mobile devices such as Android and IOS1 offer
new opportunities for software applications to be developed for
real-time applications in the field of work [12]. The mobile
phone plays an important role in the tourism industry as
tourists travelling over the world typically carry smart-phones
which they access more than their personal computers.
Therefore, there is an increase in trend for mobile based
applications [5, 10 and 14] and as different application such as
navigational assistance in large cities for exploratory services
and indoors as museum guide as discussed in [13]. When
compared to web base applications, mobile devices suffer from
restrictions that include the limited screen size and adaptability
to input devices such as the touch keyboard. The battery life [1]
gets lower as processors are getting faster requiring more
energy [15]. On the other hand, mobile applications could take
advantage when it is linked to existing web sites as its portable.
Web services are applications which are independent and
use universal language to send data and instructions to one
another, with translation requirements. Its aim is to integrate
systems and applications that communicate over a network
[16]. Web services is an important research area for developing
tourism applications as this system is mainly built retrieving
the data by calling different web services [17]. Web services
can be used for real time language translation systems [18].
Web service attempts to help reduce the communication
problems that occur between spoken languages. Extensible
mark-up language (XML) is appropriate to be used in translator
web services. By using XML format in translation application
to exchange data, web service allows the users to link request
regardless of the programming languages used to develop the
translation and computing platform being used. Translation
web service provides enough information to support the clients
with audio and video capabilities [19]. Web service provides
an audio translation and an image illustration of a word or a
phrase, making it much more powerful than a standard
dictionary. For instance, if a tourist goes to a hotel restaurant in
a foreign country, they can use mobile applications that depend
on translation web service [14]. Location finder and maps are
essential needs for many tourists. Global positioning system
(GPS) has become a core in many systems which are related to
finding the user’s location [14]. Mash up technology is used in
smart travel guide system along with web based applications
[20]. The overall idea of mash-up technology is based on open
APIs integrating and data source to create web service to serve
needs of users. It is a lightweight web application program that
associates two or more data sources (content or service) to
provide new services [21].
Google Places application programmer interface (API) is a
service provided by Google which returns information about
the nearest locations by considering the latitude, longitude and
radius of area [22]. It works basically by sending the Hypertext
Transfer Protocol (HTTP) request with required parameters
[23] and is a service used to show the direction from source to
destination with the time and distances of the path. The type of
places which can be searched for are listed in [24] and can be
added or removed according to the system’s requirements.
This paper presents a tourism information system that
enables a Centralized Tourist Travel Guide for Fiji where
different types of services are available. Our proposed system
is based on web services which provide all necessary
information and tools that are needed by tourists to organize
their trip. In order to have the system accessible in different
operating systems, a responsive website design is needed as it
gives a compact interface of the website regardless of different
screen size and resolution of the devices. A prototype of a
mobile application that demonstrates the proposed system is
implemented and tested. The proposed system employs a
responsive website design.
The paper is organized as follows. Section II gives details
of the proposed system and Section III section gives details of
implementation of the proposed system. Section IV discusses
the limitations and actual implementation and Section V
concludes the paper with discussion of future research.
II. PROBLEM BACKGROUND
A. Problem Scenario
The major problem faced by tourist travelling to Fiji is
availability of technology at a centralized application that will
assist them to plan their trip. There are more than 250 hotels
and 50 resorts in Fiji, however, they are not linked to a generic
site where the tourist can use that to select the best
accommodation for them [1]. All these resorts and hotels need
a centralized information system so that the tourist can easily
compare between the resorts/hotels in Fiji with the facilities
they provide, location and other requirements which would
assist them with the best accommodation and enable instant
booking.
There are number of different activities and events such as
horse riding game fishing, surfing hosted for the tourists
visiting Fiji [10], however, these events and activities are not
well known, since they are only published in the resorts or
hotels individual website. There are some websites (such as
tripadvisor.com and expedia.com) where some the
activities/events are updated; however, these are limited to the
popular resorts and does not cater the smaller hotels and tourist
travel sites.
Tourists at a new place always faces problem finding the
location of different facilities such as shop, hospitals, hotels,
restaurants and bus stations. Moreover, not all the facilities and
places in Fiji are marked on the Google map. The map should
also show the directions, distance and time duration taken to
reach the selected location which is not presently available as
in other countries.
Tourists visiting Fiji may not know the indigenous Fijian
(iTaukei) language that they need when communicating with
those especially in the remote villages who have limited
knowledge in English. A real-time translator system is needed,
however, there is no provision for iTaukei language in current
Google translator. Therefore, a translator for iTaueki is in dire
need to be part of the system.
There are other information that tourists need in order to
decide their plans for the day. Some of these are daily news
(local, international and sports), applications such as currency
converter and weather information.
B. Proposed Features
The proposed system is a centralized system that will be
used by tourist to plan their trip in Fiji using this single system
has all different features/tools as follows:
1) Centralized Booking System
The existing booking systems do not provide a real-time
based application which allows users to do booking at a
centralized site after comparing holiday destinations and
packages. The users usually are redirected to the main hotel site
for booking. Usability issues arise when users have to jump
from hotel to hotel to do their bookings.
Centralized booking system lists all the hotels in Fiji with
their facilities information and showing the availability of the
rooms in the particular hotel. The user is given different
filtering option that will narrow the type of hotels the tourist
wants. These filtering criteria are prices of the rooms, number
of guests, star rating, distances from airport and town and other
facilities. Selecting the type of options available for the user
gives user the set of hotels available. Then the user can
instantly book the room using the proposed system without
going to actual website of the hotel.
2) Centralized Events and Activity
This feature allows all event organizers to use an
application to give detail on the events with the date and
venue. When the user uses this feature then they will view list
of activities, the user can then confirm if they attending the
activity. They can also see other user’s comments and
comment on the activity themselves which would make other
user to decide to attend that activity of not.
3) Nearest Facility Finder
This feature gets the current position of the device/user and
allows the tourists to locate nearest facilities around them.
These facilities are hotels, taxi stands, hospital, shops and
restaurant to name a few. Upon the selection of the desired
facility/location, the directions distance and time duration taken
between current location and desired location is displayed.
4) Language Translator
This feature basically translates one the language to
another. The user selects a language of which he/she wants to
translate and a language which has to be translated to. The user
enters enter a word or a sentence and the system then translates
it to desired language. The translation services offered by
Google and Microsoft are limited in number of languages
supported. This feature will further enhance the application by
allowing native Fiji language to be incorporated with the
application
5) Other tools
a) Weather: Shows weather information of different
locations.
b) Currency Converter: This feature will allow the
tourist to select the currency they have and the system
will convert the amount to Fijian dollars by default or
any other selected currency.
c) News: This shows the local, international and sports
news.
Fig. 1 Proposed system architecture which is a web service based architecture where the data is pulled from external source
d) Social login: More and more people are now using
social authentication gateways which are publically
exposed authentication platforms such as Facebook,
Google and Microsoft. The Centralized booking
application will allow users to login using this
services depicting how external services can be
incorporated in applications to make it more user
friendly.
III. SYSTEM DESIGN
After analysis of the system requirements, the proposed
system was designed using following architecture as shown in
Fig. 1. This is a web service based architecture which was best
for such system where the data is needed for external sources
such as hotel’s data, weather data from weather API, maps,
places and direction data from Google maps, places and
direction API, social login and other services which were used.
The architecture’s main feature is that it has a single
application service which calls other services used in the
system. The main application service is connected to all the
services used by the devices. When the end-user application
accesses a feature, it calls the main service for that information
using HTTP request and relevant parameters.
The main service application then calls the actual requested
service and retrieves the information and passes it back to the
end-user application in XML.
 All the features of the system are managed by main service
that works on XML platform. Therefore, multiple
implementations for different platform are avoided. If the
system is extended to another device application, let say for
IOS, the only change in the implementation is the call to the
main service that will do the remainder of the work. Simple
Object Access Protocol (SOAP) retrieves the XML from the
required service and then sends information back to the end-
user application, regardless of the technology that is used by
the application.
XML was chosen as platform because it provides a
language which can be used between different platforms and
programming languages and still express complex messages
and functions. Web services platform used for building
services was SOAP because it’s most common used Internet
Fig. 2 UML5 Diagram Booking application data flow. This
protocol. depicts the business logic for booking system.

IV. SYSTEM IMPLEMENTATION The diagram in Fig. 3 depicts the meta descriptor or WSDL
The proposed system was implemented using web services definition from hotels to main service. The main service uses
consists of a web and android application. The web application the same definition to define its own classes. In real life
was developed using ASP.NET2 and PHP3 (server side) implementations, the hotels will be sent this description to
scripting language and the android application have Java build their services. The implementation has been with a
Programming and XML. The basic web services platform is typical normalized database with relationships do depict that
XML and HTTP for the services provided by hotels. These hotels do not need any special implementation for the services.
were implemented using Window Communication Foundation
(WFC). WCF Service application was chosen as
implementation language for services because the member had
more expertise in it compared to other languages. However,
any language could have been selected for implementation as
long as the web services platform can be accessed.

A. Booking System
The main purpose of the proposed system is to implement
the business logics of how the information will be manipulated
for their use as shown in Fig. 2. The hotel services only provide
data source in main service context but could implement its
own business logic for the hotels. The front end application are
consumer of main service and do not need to depend on any
architecture on how it will consume the main service. For a
website, the dataset could be displayed on html4 pages where
else for an Android application, the details could be shown on
mobile device.
The hotels/resort would not want to share all there
information and database to other organization due to security
and business competition reasons, therefore the proposed
design is to use web services which works on XML and HTTP
platform. It doesn’t look at the implemented technology to
retrieve information directly from the company database which Fig. 3 UML Diagram of Meta descript from hotels.
would then be consumed by the booking application to present
the information to application users. Any company that wishes B. Social login
to include there system on the central system would host a In order to authenticate users against a social network, we
service for booking site to consume. This architecture would have to create an application within the social network such as
give hotels assurance that best security is being applied to their Twitter and a Facebook application to authenticate users.
internal data since they would be responsible for it themselves What’s referenced here is a special developer token to access
and also be fully aware of what information they want to share Twitter, Facebook and other social networks. The key and
with the rest of the world. The booking application is the secret are uniquely associated with the social application.
manager of the booking service and redirect traffic to
appropriate companies without the user knowing the fact that
they are dealing with hotel database.
2
ASP.NET is a development framework for building web pages and web sites.
3
PHP is a server scripting language, and is a powerful tool for making dynamic
and interactive Web pages quickly.
4
HTML or HyperText Markup Language is the standard markup language used
to create web pages.
5
The Unified Modeling Language is a general-purpose modeling language
which is designed to provide a standard way to visualize the design of a system.
C. Weather Service
The data were pulled from weather underground weather
API6 which provides real-time weather updates for any geo-
location worldwide. The weather application makes request to
the proposed system for weather information, then the main
service requests the weather6 API for real time information.
The weather API responds with information in JavaScript
Object Notation (JSON) format to main service. These data is
sent to end-user application.

D. Translation Application
The application makes request to main service to get all
supported languages and show options on application which
then requests Google for supported languages and add on to
non-supported languages by Google service. When the main
service receives the request then it decides whether to send it to
Google or translate it with in itself. After translation the main
service returns translated text to requesting application (web or
android).
The custom translation does not implement language
support for all language. Instead it has translation of English
only. Therefore, to translate from any other language, the
application send the other language to Google translation to be Fig. 5 Flowchart of Nearest Places Finder
first translated to English and then uses internal services to
translate it to custom language.
Firstly, the system detects Internet Connection Status. The
E. Nearest Facility Finder device should be connected to the Internet as the HTTP
To implement nearest facility finder, there were some requests are made to Google API to retrieve the required
requirements and external libraries together with different web information. If the Internet is connected then system would
services which were called. The device should be connected to proceeds. It gives an alert message on connection error
internet to run this feature. The libraries used for this feature otherwise. Next the system gets users/devices current location
which is Google maps, places and direction were integrated using Google Maps Geolocation API. This feature is heavily
together as shown in Fig. 4. The following explains the tools, dependent on getting current location as the map will show the
libraries and services used for this implementation are Google information of nearby facilities, therefore, if GPS is not
Places [24], Google API Key [26] and Services Library enabled then a message alerts the user to enable GPS setting if
Requirements [27]. the user wants more exact location.

{
"geometry" : {
"location" : {
"lat" : 37.79593620000001,
"lng" : -122.40000320
},
"viewport" : {
"northeast" : {
"lat" : 37.80475270,
"lng" : -122.38399580
},
"southwest" : {
"lat" : 37.78711860,
"lng" : -122.41601060
}
}
Fig. 4 Place finder Architecture "name" : "Govinda",
"vicinity" : "Suva"
}
a) Process of implementation
The following services were called for actual Fig.6 JSON Format of received data
implementation in android as shown in Fig. 5. Same processes Once the current location is obtained then system gets
were taken in the website maps and places but using the web Google places information by HTTP requests to Google Places
Google Maps and Places APIs. API. The parameter passed to the service were current attitude
and longitude, radius - within the distance the facilities should

6
Weather API used is from http://www.weather.com. The http request is done
to the API to get the current weather details.
be in for example 1km, type of place such as restaurant, hotels.
[24] The Google places returns JSON file as shown in Fig. 6.
The system also marks other facilities which are not in the
current Google maps.
The system displays the places when required facility is
clicked, e.g. if hotels is clicked then nearby hotels in the area
will be displayed on the map. Finally, clicking on a desired
icon shown on the map gives the information about the facility
and the direction and time duration information to reach to the
location using Google Places API.
Fig. 7 Result of nearest facility finder
V. DISCUSSION
The web and android applications are tested at each
development phase by using unit testing. Since different
developers programmed the application, the integration testing
was carried out when putting all the services together to see if
all functions worked accordingly to specification.
The proposed system design has enabled to provide several
features to the tourism sector. There can be more features
added to the system by adding to the main service application
and similarly application can be built for different mobile OS.
The problem faced in the prototype is that not all services are
real time such as weather API and some services don’t provide
full information about Fiji such as Google places API.
The proposed system can be implemented in Tourism Fiji .
It can be hosted on a server and calling other services from
different web services. The cost for implementation would
consist of the hardware and marketing about the system. There
needs to be advertisements about the system at all tourism sites
and places to get this to tourist’s attention. The hotels who
want to join in the system need to implement a web service on
their system and the proposed system will pull the data from
that web service.
There are some limitations of the actual implementation.
One of which is the number of hotels having online system is
limited. Therefore, before building a web service for the hotel,
an online system needs to be built for those hotels. The online
payment systems such as PayPal8 can be used for booking the
hotel. This service is however not used by small hotels in Fiji,
therefore, a local system such as M-PAiSA9 can be used for the
payments. The arrangements can be made between Vodafone
7
Information on Tourism Fiji is on the website http://www.tourismfiji.com/.
8
PayPal is the faster, safer way to send money, make an online payment,
receive money or set up a merchant account.
9
M-PAiSA is Vodafone Fiji’s local SMS based money transfer and payment
service.
Fiji’s M-PAiSA service and the hotels for the service. The
main issue that would be faced in actual implementation is the
acceptance of the system by the tourism sector with their other
requirements.
The dashboard was made in android application to make
things centralized and easy the use as shown in the Fig. 8.
Fig. 8 Main Dashboard of the android application
VI. CONCLUSION
The aim of the research project was to develop a centralized
tourist guide system for tourist travelling to Fiji. The system
had all necessary information and provides different
features/services to tourists which would be essential to them
to plan their trip. The proposed system prototype was
implemented successfully that encourages the system to be
implemented for commercial use. The system achieved its
main goal through a flexible architecture using real time data
and operation that make use of web services.
The architecture is very efficient and secured since it only
7 requests for data which the hotels wants to provide. The hotels
confidential data is safe since the system does not connect to
hotel’s database. The web and Android application developed
to show how the architecture works and has a lot of important
features for tourists such as booking, maps and places, events,
translator, currency convertor and many others discussed in
this paper.
The future plans for the system is that the architecture can
be placed in cloud. Furthermore, an offline version of android
application for the system which won’t need full time Internet
connection get services and as soon as the application gets
connected to Internet then the application should be
automatically get synchronized with the real time service data.
In actual implementation the user interface and other
information would be made based on Fiji culture and
environment to attract more tourists.
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