How Tourist Vendors Can Benefit From Geocoding And Reverse Geocoding
Tourism is a major economic field in the modern global economy
Nowadays, tourism is one of the most important economic domains contributing to the global economy. Similar to other economic fields, tourism is highly influenced by the emerging technological applications that are released constantly. Technology and information technology development play an essential role in tourism expansion and development.
Tourism and location should use the sign of equal. Consequently, location-based services in the tourism industry are necessary nowadays.
In the tourism industry, each attraction or hotel receive numerous pins or identifiers such as address, photos, descriptions, and telephone numbers. But the most important identifiers are represented by geographic location and address because in order to reach any location on Earth you need to have the geographic coordinates of that point.
Moreover, even if you know the geographic location and you are in a big city, you have to know the address of that point. Due to this, geographic coordinates must be transformed into an address location. However, the reverse process is also necessary, since you may know the address of your hotel, but you don’t know exactly its geographical location. Due to this, it is necessary to transform the postal address into geographic coordinates. These processes of geographic location and postal address conversions are called geocoding, respectively reverse geocoding.
GIS and tourism industry
One of the major developments in information technology is the Geographic Information System (GIS). GIS has the capability to manipulate both spatial databases in the form of digital maps and attribute data in the form of alpha-numerical input. Moreover, GIS facilitates geographic search for all the features that a tourist may need during his travel.
In tourism, GIS may be utilized in several forms, especially by tour operators. For instance, accommodation in a certain area and tourist attractions within that area may be marked on the same map. Besides, using GIS tools different approaches may be developed, for example identifying the hotels located closest to most of the tourist attractions in order to convince potential tourists to choose the best hotel for their vacation.
Another important capability of GIS is the facility for visualization. Consequently, distinct layers may be overlaid and the user may add or remove different features. Functions such as layering, buffering, reclassifying, querying databases, and data integration are the most important functions that can be used in tourism applications.
A great advantage of using GIS is that all the spatial data can be geocoded by using implicit spatial reference for all the data employed in the analysis. Consequently, most of the software is user-friendly and can facilitate analytical functions.
However, a major GIS capability is the analytic function of spatial data. By using spatial analysis tools integrated into GIS, tourist vendors can identify trends in tourists’ options for their vacations and travels, getting new relationships between their offers and tourists’ options. Furthermore, by utilizing such spatial analysis, tourist vendors can have a complex perspective toward the data sets and can improve the making decision process.
Role of geocoding and reverse coding in the travel industry
Tourism development means also tourism planning, which needs a lot of spatial data such as locations and interrelation with transport and different services such as accommodation, restaurants, tourist information centers, etc. All these locations and spatial interrelations can be enhanced using geocoding and reverse geocoding.
Another great capability of geocoding is to create tourists' movement patterns since currently there are numerous applications that may locate tourists during their trips.
Mobile device development and the implementation of diverse mapping services on mobile devices represent common things nowadays. Searching for the nearest restaurant or the fastest route to a tourist attraction implies both geographical coordinates and postal addresses. Consequently, geocoding and reverse geocoding are two important ‘pieces’ in location and time-based services in the tourism industry in order to facilitate service and sight location on maps. Additionally, routing direction uses an algorithm that routes someone from one location to another. Usually, such algorithms are developed together with geocoding or reverse geocoding.
Without geocoding and reverse geocoding, travel time estimation on digital maps would not be available. By combining road networks, GIS, geocoding, and reverse geocoding, driving time or walking time can be estimated in diverse applications.
Benefits of geocoding and reverse geocoding for tourist vendors
Tourist vendors can benefit from geocoding and reverse geocoding by implementing these GIS capabilities into different tourist applications and platforms that may be used by tourists during their travel experiences.
Geocoding and reverse geocoding bring benefits in diverse applications developed for tourists’ use, such as hotel search, attractions search, and locating different services. The integration of GIS and the Internet allows users to benefit from different Web-based digital mapping behind geocoding.
Moreover, geocoding and reverse geocoding are helpful in tourism marketing too. Tourist vendors can map those locations where clients were extremely satisfied with the services, but also those locations where consumers were totally unsatisfied, reducing the cost generated with promotion for those locations.
By geocoding tourists, tourist vendors may identify the patterns of tourists in relationships with the services and the environment. By using geocoding of visitors, geospatial tourist consumer research may be developed. Such research may spatially compare tourists’ behavior and results may be extremely useful to improve sales of tourist destinations.
In addition, geocoding and reverse geocoding are useful tools in routing direction services. Both geographical coordinates and postal addresses are necessary for tourists during their trips. Due to this, both geocoding and reverse geocoding are extremely important in informational technology in the modern tourism industry for tourist vendors. Furthermore, geocoding is always related to visualization on the map.
Final remarks
Numerous applications in the tourism and travel industry use already geocoding and reverse geocoding as part of their platforms, such as the Lonely Planet Guides application, National Geographic City Guides application, Booking, TripAdvisor Content application, HomeAway Platform, and many other local tourist applications. Geocoding and reverse geocoding are a must in each application in the tourism industry since the tourism basis represents moving from point A to point B and both geographic coordinates and postal addresses are necessary to reach those points and find the best route.
Tourist vendors should understand the latest trends in the tourism industry since modern technology such as GIS has become an important part of this industry. Since most of map applications and platforms utilize reverse geocoding to transform an address into a geographic coordinate, Scale Campaign may be the best choice for tourist vendors who intend to boost their tourist services through the help of geocoding and reverse geocoding.
Scale Campaign is able to provide both geocoding and reverse geocoding services and tourist vendors can use our services to develop the best applications for their customers. Furthermore, our batch geocoding services allow our users to identify the location for more locations simultaneously.
