Tourist attraction in SW China offers better visiting experience through smart management

People's Daily Online2021-07-16 09:14

The Huangguoshu Waterfall scenic area, a national 5A tourist attraction in Anshun of southwest China’s Guizhou province, has been promoting smart management by deploying digital technologies, offering visitors a better experience.

Tourists enjoy a view of the Huangguoshu Waterfall in Anshun, southwest China's Guizhou Province on June 14, 2020. (Xinhua/Yang Wenbin)

The scenic spot has comprehensively implemented its online real-name reservation system to encourage tourists to visit at different time slots, and has also introduced self-service check-in facilities.

Thanks to these measures, dozens of visitors are able to check in simply by tapping their identity cards against a card reader at the ticket barrier and using facial recognition in under one minute, a much faster process than manual ticket checks.

The scenic spot now receives an average of 35,000 visitors every day, its daily cap, during its peak tourist season, which starts from mid-June every year. Before the implementation of the online reservation system, it only received a daily average of 10,000 tourists.

The scenic area has an intelligent command center, which includes a sightseeing bus dispatch platform, through which employees at the center can check information on each sightseeing bus, such as its real-time position, mileage, number of passengers, and driver’s status.

With the help of the platform, the center is able to efficiently arrange sightseeing buses. If there are crowds of tourists at a pick-up point, the center will send more buses to ferry them. When an area inside the scenic spot becomes crowded with visitors, the center will ask drivers to change routes and take passengers to other areas with fewer tourists.

In this way, the platform reduces the wait time for visitors and provides them with a better riding experience.

Li Jinrong, a tourist from east China’s Shanghai, is one of the many people to benefit from the smart platform. Li, who visited the scenic spot for the second time in June, shared the riding experience three years ago with People’s Daily Online. “I queued for more than one hour to buy a ticket and had to wait at each pick-up point in the scenic spot for about an hour,” Li said.

Back then, the dispatch center manually collected information on sightseeing buses and instructed drivers through interphones, which always resulted in crowds of tourists gathering at the pick-up points due to the lack of real-time information.

The scenic spot has also independently developed a management app, which is installed in all its employees’ mobile phones, to ensure timely reporting of information, and introduced an audio guide system to provide information about the attractions for visitors, who can access the service by scanning a QR code. The site will launch its VR and AR services soon.

Wu Shenghong, president of the scenic area’s operator Guizhou Huangguoshu Tourism Group Co. Ltd., said that the group will continue to accelerate smart management and provide tourists with more high-quality tourism products and services.