How we can improve tourism experiences

Portugal is experiencing a fast increase in tourism in the recent years. It has been acknowledged by several entities has a "must" for tourists to visit and this has brought the country increased revenues, thus helping to beat the economic crisis the country was facing.

We have seen a lot of transformation in our cities, having several new businesses to flourish around the tourism services, improved infrastructures, raise in employment and much more, but a lot more can be done.

We have about 3275 monuments and more than 400 museums, an excellent gastronomy and besides being a small country, we have great landscapes and beaches. We have it all!

When you face this rapid increase in tourism, you must adapt your offer to the new circumstances. One of the problems is having trained guides that know the history and culture and that can communicate at least in English to explain to tourists what they are seeing. Sure you can publish written guides, but this is not practical in this days, where all people is used to the speed of information.

Let me give one or two examples. We have several castles and monuments that need a guide to explain to tourists the history behind what they are seeing. You can provide training to a person to be a guide, but this impose restrictions in guided visits, because they must have a certain number of people and occur at specific times. Also for the tourist, it means he must keep following the guide or it will lose some explanation, not being able to spend more time watching something of his particular interest This also happens at museums, where if you lose the group, you lose information.

The problem is worse for people with disabilities, because his even more difficult to provide human solutions to every kind of disability, and tourism and culture should be an inclusive activity.

This and other problems can be solved easily with Linkmyplace. It works by placing cheap devices near monuments or works of art, and associating multimedia content to these devices. When the tourist gets in the proximity of this devices, it will trigger the exhibition of the content on their mobile phones. It's like having a personal guide in your hands, that keeps with your own pace, speaking your language, whether by spoken, written or gesture language, thus reaching a broader audience.

This solution also means that we have less need to train human guides and are less dependent on them, so you can keep pace with demand, have a better offer, save costs and achieve better notoriety.