Gartner recently spoke with a regional government that plans to push information to tourists' mobile devices. This could become a more valuable service than not-so-popular government-run tourist portals.

Governments have all sorts of customers to serve: citizens, pupils, patients, businesses - and tourists. Tourists are an attractive clientele, especially for regional and local governments, because they generate direct revenue from taxes and prices paid for public cultural attractions, and indirect revenue from the growing turnover of local businesses. They also cost little, because they do not ask for long-term assistance, such as social or education services, and guarantee some political glow too to the most visited destinations.

A few government agencies followed the chimera of tourist Web portals throughout the e-government era. They had the ambition to provide all information, from tips on what museum to visit, to restaurants and hotel search and booking functionalities. And, while Expedia, lastminute.com, and airlines and railways booking Web sites thrived, government tourist portals lagged behind with few hits. Furthermore, tourists nowadays use more advice from peers, through Web 2.0 communities, such as TripAdvisor, or even more-niche sites dedicated to special themes, such as mountaineering, cycle-touring or Slow Food to select places to visit as well as the best restaurants to dine at. However, there is one type of information that tourists cannot access through those channels - real-time handy tips once they are onsite, such as touring Paris' hundreds of museums, or sailing through the Greek Archipelago, or hiking up a peak in the Rocky Mountains. They will need a map, weather forecasts, directions for a tour that encompasses multiple landmarks, last-minute changes to museums' opening hours, and even a list of nearby pizzerias. That information is typically printed on brochures that can be picked up at the local tourist office, or distributed by the same office through hotels, hostels, campsites, bed and breakfasts (B&Bs), and so on. Proactively pushing that information through Short Message Service or Multimedia Messaging Service could provide a better, more personalized service to tourists. Why would I want to read a 100-page brochure about Amsterdam that includes a 4-by-4 meter (un)foldable map, and information about the Van Gogh museum, classical music concerts and Indian restaurants, when all I care about is the Heineken Brouwerij, steakhouses and funk-rock concerts?

To provide such value-added information, governments do not necessarily need to build ad hoc $10 million portals, which would have few accesses anyhow, because few tourists travel with their laptops. Nor will they have to deploy networks, because, in some cases, they already have agreements with mobile phone operators; for example, to push messages in case of emergencies. Hopefully, they will use those services very rarely, so why not leverage contractual agreements to text tourists with messages that are easier to handle, as they have less-stringent requirements in terms of security and network prioritization. Local governments do not even need to provide all the content; they can mash up and link the information they own with information typically provided by private businesses, such as publishers of tourist maps and guides, or of yellow pages. And they can still collaborate with hotels, hostels, B&B and campsites to channel information; instead of handing out brochures, hotel receptionists will provide phone numbers that by texting keywords will return the desired personalized content.

To implement such a service, local governments will have to build a set of skills that include the ability to segment tourists and design personalized services, the capability to set up and manage partnerships with private-sector content providers and network operators with a sustainable financing model, and technical competencies that lean more toward maintaining and updating their own content and mashing it with private sector partners, rather than deploying new platforms and syndicating content from a hundred different sources. If governments manage to do this, they can make tourists happier, and most likely spend less than if they tried to build fancy tourist portals.