Geospatial support for Touristic Destination Selection and Trip Planning
The AskWhere project goal is development of a tool supporting the process of selection of travel destination in reference to wide set of criteria. We divided all of Europe area into hexagonal 5 km base cells and assigned climate, air quality, landscape, services availability, accessibility, popularity and costs information to each cell. The user defines the characteristics and criteria of the tourist destination he is interested in, and the application finds a hexagon that meets them and presents it on the map.
Comprehensive database covering the variety of planned tourism destinations selection criteria was curtail to achieve the major functionality of the application. The system uses specific form of information storage, namely unified reference hexagonal grid with thematic information referred to each of the cells. Applied hexagonal grid’s resolution is 5km and it covers only lands. The grid coverage, that is also the platform’s service area, includes following countries and dependent territories:
- Albania
- Andorra
- Austria
- Belgium
- Bosnia and Herzegovina
- Bulgaria
- Croatia
- Cyprus
- Czech Republic
- Denmark
- Estonia
- Faroe Islands
- Finland
- France
- Germany
- Gibraltar
- Greece
- Guernsey
- Hungary
- Iceland
- Ireland
- Isle of Man
- Italy
- Jersey
- Latvia
- Liechtenstein
- Lithuania
- Luxembourg
- Malta
- Moldova
- Montenegro
- Netherlands
- North Macedonia
- Norway
- Poland
- Portugal
- Romania
- San Marino
- Serbia
- Slovakia
- Slovenia
- Spain
- Sweden
- Switzerland
- United Kingdom
AskWhere features & functionalities
- Selection of touristic destination on the base of user’s preferences;
- Evaluation of touristic destination;
- Benchmarking of touristic destinations;
- Accessing shared content;
- Planning a trip around destination surroundings;
- Planning a travel to destination point;
- Searching for services in destination area.
The project is co-financed by the European Space Agency under the Navigation Innovation and Support Program (NAVISP).