mTourism multilingual integrated solution: A case study “EgyptTravel”

“EgyptTravel” is the official mTourism App for Egypt which is developed mainly to encourage tourists to visit Egypt. This App is a part of cooperation between Center for Documentation of Cultural and Natural Heritage (CULTNAT) a center affiliated with Bibliotheca Alexandrina (BA), Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT), and Egypt Tourism Authority (ETA). To reach as many users as possible, EgyptTravel App is designed to support different languages, different platforms, different screen sizes of mobile and tablet devices, provide many functions with a user friendly and simple interface, and consider the mobile device limitations such as storage and network bandwidth. All these items are considered while designing the EgyptTravel App as it supports 7 different languages (Arabic, English, French, German, Italian, Russian, and Spanish), provides various and helpful functions to the user (List, Gallery, Map, Video Streaming, and Tracker), and is developed to support three of the most common platforms: Android, iOS, and Windows Phone 8 (The App is available in the iTunes Apps store and the Google Play store). This paper will shed light on the different challenges and experiences of developing the “EgyptTravel” App.