The purpose of the Department of Tourism, Government of Odisha mobile application is to increase the digital footprint of the prospective tourists to the State. Technology plays a key role in uplifting the overall landscape of the tourism industry. Visitors will use this handy mobile application that has ability to bring about revolutionary transformation in the Odisha tourism sector. Visitors while planning a vacation with family members, friends or when on official visits with the advent of the tourism mobile app, will be able to plan effortlessly and know about the demographics they are visiting in advance. They will get to know about the travel agent’s, hotels, food, travel locations, places of stay, roads to take, and plan their itinerary for making proper travel arrangements. The various components of the travel can be planned for their trip/ vacation ahead of time. This app will also promote the various Tourism products the state has to offer. Content Administration: Content management implies to a dedicated process of planning, organizing, creating, and publishing of all content onto the application. This module will help the content management team of the department plan, organize, develop, and schedule content that is valuable to their desired target audience. The Content management administration will form the backbone of the mobile application that will be developed for the department in Android. Geographical proximity of places using GPS: A standard search feature that will be developed with the mobile application is to show the geographical proximity of different places or locations. When a user searches for ‘Places to visit’, ‘Restaurants’ etc. the result of the search would show the location of the places on the map along with distance from search location and the time taken to reach the place. This would be an integration of the map feature on the module application.The Tourist destination feature will show all the tourist destination of the state on the application to the visitor. There would be informative content in the form of Videos, Audio, Images and Textual content for the visitor to refer to, in order to under the various details about the tourist place, like the location, signification, demography, importance, local products, provisions at the site, access to the site by Air, Rail and Road etc. These details will help the tourists plan their travel to the different locations. Along with this the application will also show the ‘Where to stay’, and ‘What to do’ data for information of the user. Events & Entertainment: Whenever a tourist is planning to visit a tourist location that is showing on the mobile app, there will be a facility in the mobile application to view the events and entertainment scope available at the location during the different hours of the day. The events and entertainment scope will primarily consist of any entertainment shows, local events of tourism significance, cultural shows, fairs, etc. that the tourist can visit. This will help the tourist plan better and in advance while planning to visit such places. The visitor or the tourist can add these events schedule to their mobile phone calendar for reminder purpose.
Public Transport Details: Displaying the details of the public transportation facility, like that of the taxi, bus etc., at a tourist location is an ideal way to promote tourism in any state / location. This will boost the morale of the visitor to a location and in turn help the tourist plan the visit to the location. The details of the public transport available at the tourist location will be displayed on the mobile application and will include of vehicle type, driver name, vehicle capacity, destinations and timings. Another very frequently looked up feature on the informative mobile applications is the information regarding Fire Station, Police Station, State Transport, and Women’s helpline for the location of the tourist site.