Tour attractions in the Kingston and Niagara areas will soon offer customers a unique tourism experience through a novel business model that uses profit sharing, a satellite global-positioning system (GPS) and simultaneous language-translation technology.

Visitors to participating attractions will learn about local landmarks in their own languages by wearing a mobile, wireless headset developed by International Tour Entertainment Corp. (ITEC). The headset allows users to hear about attractions simply by being in front of them.

While this audio-tour technology is new, so is the partnership model, says Jeremy Laurin, the Kingston native who co-created the product and is chief operating officer of the Markham-based company.

In return for a share of the profits, ITEC provides the $150,000-plus systems to tourism attraction operators free of charge. ITEC's service includes multilingual commentaries in any number of languages, complete with dramatic sound effects.

Michael Lea, Business Edge

Jeremy Laurin gets the lowdown from his tourism information unit in front of Kingston City Hall.

"There isn't another company on the planet that develops audio tours that align themselves with the venue attractions themselves in the sales and promotion of the venue experience," Laurin told Business Edge.

A former manager at Gananoque-based tour company Rockport Boat Line, Laurin is also an avid traveller and has long been familiar with the troubles associated with audio commentary systems.

Self-directed walking tours often use numerical keypads that require the user to fumble with a keypad to listen to information about a corresponding object or landmark. Other self-directed headset tours are pre-recorded and run too fast for slow walkers and too slow for fast walkers.

As the president and founder of Kingston-based NewDAE Technologies, Laurin co-developed a new software several years ago that provided multilingual commentary systems to tour-boat companies in Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom.

NewDAE, which was developing software for an earlier version of what ITEC now provides, has since been rolled into ITEC.

NewDAE's original software enabled tour companies to run commentaries over a boat's speaker system in several different languages.

But the amount of information that could be relayed was limited because visitors had to listen to commentaries in all the other languages before moving on to descriptions of the next site in their own language.The ITEC wireless GPS headset technology allows for detailed, simultaneous commentary in an unlimited number of languages.

The business model, although new to the tourism industry, has been used in other sectors for years. Office machine companies, for example, might provide expensive equipment such as photocopiers for free in exchange for a per-page fee for a fixed period.

ITEC's partnership model, which provides the systems free of charge, works in much the same way, Laurin says.

ITEC recognized that seasonal tourism operators can't afford the substantial sums it costs to buy an ITEC system, so the company decided to emulate the same model used by equipment manufacturers and other high-technology companies.

"Instead of asking the tourism attraction to pay $150,000 to $200,000 for the system, we said we will take a small percentage of your take per head," Laurin says, adding that ITEC might take 20 per cent.

"What's nice for the attraction operator is they recognize they have a partner who is committed to the mutual success of the program," he says. "We're now mutually invested in the operation."

Laurin is confident that any operator using the system will lure more tourists because he's seen it happen with earlier versions of the technology.

Catamaran Cruises, a tour-boat company that takes tourists along the Thames River in London, England, grew its business by 116 per cent in 2000 as a result of using the predecessor to ITEC's system, the one developed by NewDAE, Laurin says. In its second year, the business grew by 100 per cent, he adds.

So far, about 25 tourism attraction operators in four regions - Kingston and Niagara in Ontario along with Boston and San Francisco - have ordered the system for the spring and ITEC hopes to bring 80 to 100 attractions on board by the end of the year.

Kingston attraction operators, local hoteliers and the city's economic development agency recently provided $100,000 and the provincial government $200,000 to launch a marketing initiative for the local program, which involves six tourism attractions.

The government funding comes from a recovery plan developed to help boost tourism in the wake of the SARS outbreak in 2003.

David Oved, assistant to Ontario Tourism Minister Jim Bradley, says the province provided the money to ITEC because of the leading-edge nature of the technology, local support for the initiative and because of its potential to increase tourism.

"It's obvious ITEC's service increases Kingston's appeal to overseas travellers by translating the city's attractions into their native tongues," Oved says.

The $300,000 paid for a live webcast from Kingston in January that was broadcast simultaneously in six languages. Foreign tourism operators in 22 countries who represent hundreds of thousands of potential visitors were invited to watch it.

The money is also paying for a 90-day world marketing tour. Laurin and another ITEC representative will visit tourism operators around the globe to tell them about the unique, multilingual tourism experience available in Kingston. Within five years, ITEC hopes to represent 1,000 venues in North America, Asia, Europe and Latin America.

ITEC has its work cut out for itself, however.

It's up against two industry leaders who are firmly entrenched in the business.

New York City-based Acoustiguide and Antenna Audio, based in London, England, already operate in museums, zoos, aquariums, heritage sites and tradeshows around the world.

Acoustiguide and Antenna Audio provide multilingual tours, like ITEC does, but Laurin says that's where their similarities end. Only ITEC provides a simultaneous language translation with wireless GPS technology and its profit-sharing model, he says.

Kathleen Allen, president and general manager of Rockport Boat Line, one of ITEC's partners in the Thousand Islands, says she's looking forward to implementing the new technology because it will enhance the tour experience for all her customers.

Rockport has been using the predecessor technology from NewDAE for several years to translate its tour into 13 languages over the vessel's loudspeaker.

The language-translation technology is crucial to the boatline's success because it caters to many international travellers, she says.

The current loudspeaker system, however, limits the number of languages that can be broadcast on a cruise.

"You can imagine it would be difficult to play more than five or six without limiting the amount of information you can share with your customers," Allen says.

The ability to offer tours in several languages broadcast simultaneously gives Rockport Boat Line the ability to expand its commentary and improve the overall tour experience, Allen adds. "It will enhance what we already have."

Words like Allen's are music to Laurin's ears - because, for Laurin and ITEC, enhancing the tourism experience is what their business is all about.

(Frank Armstrong can be reached at armstrong@businessedge.ca)