Design and Development of Travel Assist, An App to Support Smart Tourism

Abstract

Tourism is the third largest contributor to Malaysia’s GDP, worth MYR 86.1 billion in 2019. It is expected that the number of tourists to Malaysia will reach 30 billion in 2020, translated to MYR 100 billion receipts. The Malaysian Smart Tourism 4.0 Initiative strives to unlock the full potential of the tourism industry through enabling technologies of IR 4.0. This work reports the results of an innovation project to support smart tourism in Malaysia. It entails the design and development of Travel Assist, a mobile App for visitors to Malaysia. Travel Assistintegrates three common web services: Google Translate, Google Maps, and XE Converter, into one App. It was developed using MIT App Inventor and Adobe Dreamweaver, and suitable for iOS and Android 7.0 (Nougat) devices and above. The App was tested by a group of users to confirm its functionality and feasibility, and the validation results are encouraging. The underlying technology is robust enough to support future innovation ideas and services under the IR 4.0 umbrella.

An Innovative Mobile Application for Wellness Tourism Destination Competitiveness Assessment: The Research and Development Approach

“…Innovation is not just about creating something new; it should improve current technology to uphold the foundation of a nation's community. Previous studies focused on technological application development to support growth in the context of specific areas related to wellness tourism such as a digital platform-mediated tourism system for self-service information support in small-town destinations [23], mobile applications for information system management of agrotourism activities and attractions [24], applications recommending cultural tourism activities [25], mobile applications to strengthen the relationship among agents of local communities/entities and promote mediation mechanisms among all stakeholders [26], Travel Assist, a mobile app for visitors [27] and an intelligent system that integrated data analysis over a mobile cloud IoT computing platform to promote the rural leisure tourism industry [28]. However, limited literature is available concerning the development of innovative mobile applications for wellness tourism destination competitiveness assessment and classifying the competitiveness level of wellness tourism destinations for accurate and reliable decision-making.…”

“…However, this prototype did not address any potential ethical considerations or limitations related to data privacy, security, or user consent in the development and evaluation of the CeNTER application. Samsudin et al [27] designed and developed a mobile app, termed Travel Assist, for visitors to Malaysia by integrating three common web services: Google Translate, Google Maps, and XE Converter into one app, which was then tested by a group of users to confirm its functionality, feasibility, and validity. A questionnaire was used to evaluate the ease of use of Travel Assist.…”