To fulfil the criteria of UNESCO Global Geoparks, Shilin Geopark Administration is recently committed to building important capacity to improve the quality of our geotourism. The main problem is how to enhance services including environmental sanitation, tourism facilities, protective measures, monitoring systems and systems providing information. It’s a hard work to do, but we have spent a long time to meet the appropriate standards. During the National Day Holiday, we tended to check if we really have made some improvements.

Most importantly, we have combined intelligent scenic area management with Shilin Smart Tourism which is a programme conducted in 2023 including establishing a Scenic Area Digital Visualization Management Platform, Landscape Environment Monitoring System, Scenic Area Safety Monitoring Management System and so on. We hope we could improve our digital management.

At the entrance area, we have installed facial recognition system that can help visitors enter the park easily and we have also arranged enough ticket inspectors to help visitors use ID cards. Through this attempt, we found that our machines were not very sensitive and most visitors were not familiar with this new mode of entrance. So we decided to train the ticket inspectors to be more professional and patient, which can help visitors to adapt to this new mode quickly and make them enter the park easily. The machine also need to be upgraded regularly by our cooperative companies or our own technical staff to avoid some technical errors.

We also cooperated with a science and technology company to improve our monitoring systems which can help visitors find their lost children in accordance with children’s facial features or the color and style of their clothes. This corporation could help our managerial staff response to some accidents more quickly, such as fire hazard, some visitors get serious injured because of climbing stones or some try to use unmanned aerial vehicles which may harm other visitors’ safety. For the future we will improve this monitoring system to achieve high-precision positioning and build a comprehensive emergency response system, which may benefit more tourists.

As for the environment, we have hired lots of local people as sanitation workers to clean the whole geopark and they also play the role of promoting environmental protection. Meanwhile, we have used Landscape Environment Monitoring System that can help us detect some places where rubbish are piled up or someone who is polluting the environment. In this way, we can not only alleviate employment problems, but also promote digital transformation.

We have then paid much attention to infrastructure development. We first checked all the facilities and made a record of damaged ones. After the discussion with skilled workers, we repaired some facilities and replaced the serious ones. We have also built some new facilities based on our own experiences and tourists’ advice such as baby care rooms, barrier-free toilets, SOS emergency phone, more scenic benches, electric sightseeing vehicles in the Geopark, a sightseeing aircraft, a food court with various kinds of traditional snack stands and so on.

Additionally, due to a large number of visitors, we need to improve our voluntary service system. On the one hand, we aim to depend on social forces to support the management of whole geopark, so we have recruited lots of volunteers from universities. Moreover, all the staff from Shilin Geopark Administration who are more familiar with the geopark are also required to be the volunteers especially during the festivals. They all wear green vests and provide professional help for visitors.

After the National Day Holiday we find that the management of Shilin Geopark has advanced a lot, but if we want to truly improve the quality of geotourism, we need to do more.