Grodno mobile guide to be launched in March

The mobile guide for Grodno and Grodno District will be available for tourists in March 2015, BelTA learned from Deputy Chairman of the Grodno Oblast department of the Belarusian Tourism and Sport Union Sergei Koleda.

The mobile guide is the system of QR codes which will be installed at the most popular objects of the historical and cultural legacy of the region. Initially the system will comprise 40 tourist attractions in Grodno and ten attractions in Grodno District. The owners of modern phones and smartphones with the access to the Internet will be able to get information about the tourist attraction by making a photo of a picture with the code. The mobile phone will scan the code and redirect the user to the special resource with the text and sound information about the facility. The guide will also show which tourist attractions are located nearby. The information about all facilities will be available in Russian, Belarusian, Polish, Lithuanian, English, and German. The information content of the mobile app was created by the team of historians, experts, and translators.

In February tablets with QR codes will be installed at historical and architectural monuments, other important buildings of the oblast capital. In Grodno District tablets with the codes will be installed near the Grodno Fortress, the Augustow Canal, in Svyatsk, on the churches in Gozha, Privalka, Sopotskin.

The development of the mobile guide for Grodno and Grodno District is envisaged by the international technical aid project “Promotion of tourism by raising the awareness about the history and culture of the regions” of the Latvia-Lithuania-Belarus trans-boundary cooperation program. The Grodno City Executive Committee (the Education, Sport and Tourism Department) and the Grodno Oblast department of the Belarusian Tourism and Sport Union ate the partners of the project on Belarus’ behalf. Lithuania is represented by the administration of the Druskininkai municipality and the Lithuanian association of rural tourism. The project is in the final stage. A similar mobile guide will be launched in Lithuania in April. More than 40 tourist attractions will get QR codes in Druskininkai District.

The project “Promotion of tourism by raising the awareness about the history and culture of the regions” aims to increase the inflow of tourists to the border regions of Belarus and Lithuania, create a positive tourism image of Grodno and Druskininkai as the centers of innovation and business, design innovative mobile applications for the distribution of important social and cultural information.