Financial Times

SMS used to trace hundreds of tourists
Using mobile phone technology to the fullest, an enterprising Sri Lankan launched an initiative last week that tracked down scores of stranded foreign tourists including billionaire professionals and businessmen.

With the help of some dedicated individuals that developed a software for an emergency SMS on the roaming service, Chris Dharmakirthi led a team that tracked down scores of visitors, put them in touch with embassies or loved ones and re-united them.

Dharmakirti, co-chairman of the SMI cluster at the National Council for Economic Development (NCED), said he devised the plan since many small guesthouses that come under the SMI category were affected. "We wanted to reach the Free Independent Traveller (FITs) as they would be the worst affected unlike the group travellers. That's how we hit on tracking them through mobile phones with roaming facilities," he said.

Of the some 15,000 tourists in the country at that time, 10,200 had mobile phones with roaming facilities. This is how the entire information gathering operation worked:

Dialog, Celltel and SLT were contacted and brought on board. Hello Corp, the call centre, was used as one of the coordination centres. Tilak Conrad, an IT specialist, and his team helped to develop special software that had 20 questions for respondents to answer through an SMS. These included location of person; nationality; whether injured or not; airline used to travel in, scheduled departure dates, email of close relative and contact number.

The team found that there were 4,600 phones that were working based on calls made overseas on Christmas Eve and even after the tsunami hit the country. Of this, 2,800 tourists responded while 1000 gave all the details that were required. Based on contact numbers given, the Hello Corp 30-plus team led by Mohamed Hashim then called relatives of the tourists overseas and said they were safe.

Con"Relatives overseas were so relieved that they blessed the Hello Corp operators and thanked them profusely," Dharmakirti recalled, saying the team was so motivated that they themselves wanted to go to the affected areas and rescue the victims.

The specially designed software also enabled the information coming into the database to be instantly fed to an Internet website where anyone seeking a relative could log in the name and if that information was available, the details would be there. "We had many emails from those overseas who had tracked their lost relatives through this system," he said.

Some 100 billionaire businessmen and professionals were among those rescued under this exercise. A team from Hong Kong-based Hill & Associates, one of the world's leading security risk management and business intelligence firms, that flew into Colombo to launch a search and rescue mission for their clients on holiday here, were guided by this tracking mechanism.

Several stranded Sri Lankans who have roaming facilities also sent SMS messages seeking help and the tracking team is working with other government agencies to trace Sri Lankans with mobile phones who cannot be traced as yet.

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