Evaluation of Beyond MaaS Concept and Technical Solution: Case Enriched Travel Chains

The Beyond MaaS concept aims at combining digital mobility services with the digitalized information about the contexts and reasons of mobility in an intelligent way. Trip planners and various degrees of MaaS approaches have made public transportation easier to use but the modal shift to more sustainable mobility is still lagging the goals. Integrating rich, machine-readable digital representation of destinations and services making people to travel and mobility service, it is possible to optimize human activities as a whole and create new schemes that attract people more often to use sustainable transport modes. This paper provides an example of the Beyond MaaS concept aimed at tourism in rural areas: Enriched Travel Chains. The concept aims at making multi-part public transportation travel chains more attractive by automatically suggesting the traveler PoIs and activities for the waiting times between the travel chain parts. Enriched Trip Planner (ETP) realizes the concept as a web application. The first experiences from the implementation reveals the challenges with scarcity and quality of tourist service and PoI data. On the other hand, first impressions from the tests of the ETP prototype provide promising directions for further development utilizing crowd-sourced or niche data for tourist mobility for special interests.