Location-based and Personalized Information Services for Spas

As many people obtaining treatments do not come from the vicinity their knowledge of leisure facilities and special events varies and is strongly dependent on their experience and the information offered by the wellness-centre about local destinations. Destination management includes marketing material such as brochures, pamphlets, street advertisement and more recently online resources accessible via the world wide web. Guests at a spa tend to be overwhelmed by the multitude of material. The main drawback of paper-based information delivery is its static nature hence not permitting to address people personally. While abandoning paper-based material, we aim at emphasizing individualized online information, provided mainly through mobile phones. To provide individualized information, potential users can be identified by a number of attributes. The two main groups are patients attending a cure or rehabilitation and tourists being on holiday and thus interested in offers of the spa. Given these two user groups temporal constraints about the attendance of patients and tourists can be derived (see section 3 for details). Many patients are elderly people and hence may experience some form of print disability especially in relation to mobile phones (1). Previous research revealed that the paradigm of "one document for all" (as is inherent also to paper- based information) is not directly suitable for the heterogeneity of print-disabled people (4). Thus all content delivered by mobile devices implicates an added value only if it becomes accessible through adaptation.