Mobile Travel Guide for Budget Travelers

The rapid advancement of information and commnnication technologies has being
shaping up a new value chain for tourism. Some travel organizers are getting less profit
from the standard package tours because of the shift in the structure of tourism. This is
because, nowadays travelers or tourists especially backpackers are no longer depending
on the travel organizers. People nowadays have no more time to plan their trip and go for
a package for a few days time. Thus, whenever these busy people have a little leisure
time for a vacation, they will just pack their things into the backpacker, and go for an
unplanned vacation. Before going to a trip, they will first find some information via
tourism-related website so that they will have an idea on where to go. Once they have the
idea, they just go for that trip without knowing they might be facing some kind of
problem such as lack of money, getting lost, having no idea on what are the tourists
attraction at a new place which can cause them to have a difficult time during the trip
occurred. This is because tourism websites are not very informative to meet the travelers'
expectations and needs. This research is aims to design and develop a Mobile Travel
Guide for Budget Travelers to assist the travelers especially for the backpackers in
information seeking and searching through mobile phone. The system will help travelers
by giving a suggestion list of possible places of interest where the tourists can go within a
limited budget. Basically, the system will provide information needed by tourist such as
accommodation, places of interest, transportation, travel and destination organizations.
The system will be developed by using a System Development Life Cycle Model which a
throwaway prototyping will be used in designing the system. The system will use Java 2
Micro Edition (J2ME) platform where it has been used in most of mobile phone available
in the market. This paper reports on the researches that have been made for the
development stages and the as well as the system architecture of the system. The report
also included the final results of the findings as well as the recommendations that have
been made for the future enhancement.