Enhancing the Visitor Experience Along the Sibiu County Trails
By: Burnon Chen, Meredith Eddy, Edward Philippo, Marissa Thomas, Nicole Whipkey
Welcome to our Interactive Qualifying Project on outdoor trails in Sibiu, Romania. We are a student team from Worcester Polytechnic Institute completing our undergraduate degrees. This seven week project was supposed to be completed in Bucharest, Romania, but due to the COVID-19 pandemic, was completed remotely from Worcester, Massachusetts. Our goal for this project was to investigate how to promote trails and enhance the trail user experience to assist the Sibiu County Tourism Association and the Mioritics Association in improving relationships and communication between visitors, trail managers, and local businesses. To complete this project, our team distributed surveys, interviewed trail guides, trail managers, and local businesses, researched online blogs and videos, and researched different problem reporting forms, hiking applications, and counting systems for trails. From these methods, the team learned where trail users come from, how local businesses can promote trails and cater to trail user needs, and different forms of technology that may help enhance the trail user experience, such as a hiking application, a problem reporting form, and a counting system. The team then developed a set of deliverables for the collaborators so that they can apply what they learned to the trails. These deliverables included an infographic explaining how businesses can improve trail user experience, a problem reporting form wireframe, a set of recommended hiking applications the collaborators can partner with, and a report of recommended counting system to track the quantity and movement of trail users.