Geo-Coaching - a multifunctional offer for tourism

The everyday use of GPS units is continually growing and establishing itself in many different areas of application. Especially outdoor recreation enthusiasts enjoying individual sports, such as mountain biking and cross country skiers, use these gadgets for quick orientation and guidance. The further dissemination of the technology for outdoor recreation purposes seems to be impeded by three constraints in particular: - Many GPS-products are currently not very user-friendly; - For many outdoor recreation activities the quality of GPS -data for various activities (i.e. inline skating, long distance riding) is insufficient; - The technology is currently of limited accuracy only in forested and mountainous areas Our research project “geo-coaching” focuses on reducing these barriers and adaptation the technology so it becomes attractive for a wide-spread use among the various outdoors user groups. Therefore main focus is to detect different preferences regarding usability of gps-gadgets. Therefore a differentiated market analysis was conducted to learn more about user groups and about the demand for specific applications. For example, 35% of the tourist communities in Austria and Southern Germany indicated interest in participating as model communities in the project. We also desire to develop the GEO-COACHING concept as a flexible visitor management and educational tool for national parks; for the same reasons it has enormous potential as an environmental education tool for children and teenagers who are much more adapt to modern technology.