Leveraging the Capacity of the Personal Digital Assistant in the Emerging Age of Ambient Intelligence: The Rent a Mobile Guide Case.

In the emerging age of Ambient Intelligence wherein the customer will become ever more demanding, businesses must be innovative and apply advanced technologies to meet and exceed customers' expectations. The relationship between information and communication technology embedded in a global net and tourism offers an excellent basis for innovation. It served as a departure point for the development and testing of the Rent-A-Mobile Guide (RAMG), which leverages distributed capacity through the application of a personal digital assistant (PDA), enabling users to co-create the content of their personalized travel experience derived, in part, from lifestyle research and their spatial interaction with tourist destination Stakeholders. The identification of the customers' lifestyle allows the RAMG and its network stakeholders to sense and respond to individual customers' expectations and take measures that provide exclusive access to any source of information, at any place and lime, resulting in increased purchase volumes and user loyalty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]