GUNSAN, UCLG ASPAC active member, is setting plans for 2021 as a recovery year for the shrinking tourism industry to discover and implement various policies to revitalise the tour city from the pandemic. Below are the innovations that the city is making to be implemented in its tourism field.
- Non-face-to-face Tourism Measures
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- Continuing using of stamp tours to visit (and check-in) tourist attractions. More than 14,000 people participated in the photo tour in 2019.
- Developing a new photo tour programme. The local government of Gunsan has selected 50 primary tourist resources in Gunsan, classified them into four themes, and designated photo spots. Tourists can receive local specialities as gifts by sharing photos taken at tourist attractions on social media.
- The city tour, which used to be a large bus, modified the contents in response to the voices of tourists. Small bus services have been added for small individual tours.
- Preparing Organisation of Local Festivals in Hybrid Mode
The local government of Gunsan is preparing to organise The Time Travel Festival. It is a street-type cultural experience festival in Gunsan, a repository of modern cultural heritage, with the unique trans-construction motif of “time travel to the past.” It is the city’s representative festival that marks its ninth anniversary this year.
The local government of the city is planning to have the festival led by the private sector. By doing so, the local government also expects to draw a wide range of participation from local people, but still anticipates the crowd by distributing the festival period and usage of space. It plans to expand the contents of the time travel festival not only in modern times but also in ancient times, modern times, and the future.
- Creating a SMART Tourism City
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- Gunsan City will create a SMART tourism environment by providing a mobile platform to provide differentiated experiences, convenience, and services for visitors before and after travelling to Gunsan. It will enable the local government to gather data and, thus, do the analysis. The city will apply innovative technologies to continuously improve and develop tourism content and infrastructure.
- Tourism information from big data is collected, analysed, and processed to formulate tourism policies; for example, by providing information on the congestion of real-time tourist attractions, tourism patterns, consumption trends, and visiting population trends. Innovative technology (Augmented Reality (AR)/Virtual Reality (VR)/Artificial Intelligence (AI)) is applied on travel destinations and festival content to support location-based augmented reality guidance.
- Establish 5G and public Wi-Fi to easily search accommodation, restaurants, and to experience information in a pleasant digital environment, and make real-time reservation payments. The local government is also thinking to provide multilingual support tour guides using close-range communication, and various intelligent services such as real-time public parking lots.
Applying these innovations, the local government of Gunsan expects to create an innovative tourism industry ecosystem by developing new products and fostering local start-ups based on smart tourism cities.
