Evaluating the Guimarães 2012 European Capital of Culture (ECOC): a Tourist Perception Approach

Guimarães has hosted, during the year of 2012, one of the European Capital of Culture (ECOC). The evaluation of the event is needed as public, private and community funds are involved. The approach considers the tourists (domestic and international) as external and independent stakeholders who assessed the cultural activities developed during the event and the attributes of the city. The results of the survey show that hosting the 2012 ECOC was a major contribution for attracting new visitors to the city, although many of them just for a short period of time. The main source of general information collected by tourists was the Internet, and the traditional media. Only a small amount of respondents demonstrated a specialized knowledge of the cultural program. The most cited and appreciated performances came from the areas of music, exhibitions, and theatre. According to the perceptions of tourists, the tangible assets were clearly detached from the set of attributes of Guimarães, including buildings, churches and chapels, whereas intangible assets were less noted. Overall, Guimarães received a very positive evaluation related to city image and stay and is highly recommended by tourists to friends and relatives.

A Travel Optimization System for Academic Environments

Carpooling initiated in America in the 1970s due to the oil crisis. However, over the past years, carpooling has increased significantly across the world. Some countries have created a High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) lane to encourage commuters not to travel alone. In additional, carpool websites has been developed to facilitate the connection between the commuters, making it possible to create a compatible match in a faster and efficient manner. This project focuses on carpooling, especially in an academic environment since younger people are more likely to choose carpool. Initially, an intense research was made to examine carpool studies that occurred all over the world, following with a research of higher education institutes that use carpooling as a transportation mode. Most websites created carpools by targeting people from a specific country. These commuters have different origins and destinations making it more complicated to create compatible matches. The objective of this project is to develop a system helping teachers and students from an academic environment to create carpool matches. This objective makes it easier to create carpools because these students and teachers have the same destination. During the research, it was essential to explore, as many as possible, existing carpool websites that are available across the world. After this analysis, several sketches were made to develop the layout and structure of the web application that’s being implemented throughout the project. Once the layout was established, the development of the web application was initiated. This project had its ups and downs but it accomplished all the necessary requirements. This project can be accessed on the link: http://ipcacarpool.somee.com. Once the website was up and running, a web-based survey was developed to study the reasons that motivate people to consider carpooling as an alternative to driving alone. To develop this survey was used a tool called Survey Planet. This survey contained 408 respondents, which 391 are students and 17 are teachers. This study concludes that a majority of the respondents don’t carpool, however they will consider carpooling if there was a dedicated parking space. A majority of the respondents that carpool initiated less than a year ago, indicating that this mean of transportation is recent.