Making the Eifel region accessible

The aim of this idea is to develop a digital application that offers tailored recommendations for accessible travel experiences in North Rhine-Westphalia. The information provided by the app can not only be accessed, but is brought to the relevant people’s attention by tailoring data to the respective users by taking into account the users’ individual needs and preferences. The app is also aimed at other groups, such as families with pushchairs and people with heavy luggage. Involved in the idea are the organisation Tourismus NRW e.V., the Fraunhofer Institute for Software and Systems Engineering (ISST) and the company Eifel Tourismus (ET) GmbH.

Why are you a strong team?

The various skills of our team members from the fields of accessible travel, artificial intelligence, data management and marketing make us a unique and strong team. We complement each other with our different areas of expertise and work together to progress and implement the project idea.

Explain your idea in three sentences.

The aim of our idea is to develop a digital application in the form of a progressive web app (PWA) that uses a recommender system to offer accessible travel recommendations. It should also consider the needs and requirements of users. Although the focus is on people with disabilities, the actual implementation benefits all users equally.

What makes your idea special?

The application creates a supervised learning approach for accessible tourism. The information should not only be easy to find, but also ‘delivered’ to users through the display of customised data from the PWA based on the users and their needs, thus making it easier for them to plan their trip. People with disabilities need reliable and specific information about offers so that they can assess whether they can use them.

What are the next steps?

In collaboration with project partners Eifel Tourismus GmbH, Fraunhofer Institute for Software and Systems Engineering (ISST) and Tourismus NRW e.V., we are currently working on a concept for the implementation of our idea. This will be followed by talks with a technical service provider and obtaining offers in order to finally put the idea into practice.