Should tourism=information information=office be labelled in US English presets as “Visitor Center”? Or as “Tourist Information Office”? Or as something else?
Should information=visitor_centre be added to iD presets?
Overall, I am just horribly confused and I have desperate hope that situation is actually clear after all. Though I suspect it is not at all.
For me (!) the tag:information=visitor_centre makes sense and I see the difference between information=office (here in Switzerland mostly run by the local tourist organisation) and visitor_centre (run by the “attraction” (tourist attraction, company, building-project whatever)).
I’d broadly agree with that. I’d just add that for me the key difference as a map user is the range of information provided. If I see a tourist information centre on a map, I’d generally expect to be able to ask about a wide range of things of interest to tourists in the area or city. At a visitor centre I would only expect to be informed on a narrower range of questions related to the specific attraction (but possibly in a lot more depth than a generic tourist information centre).
Me three. There’s a bit of overlap, but the difference between the two is a information=office provides general info about an overarching area, whereas a information=visitor_centre provides specific information about a particular amenity/attraction/etc. There’s also a lot of overlap between a visitor centre and a museum; in my experience often the former contains the latter, or vice versa.
Unfortunately what adds to confusion is that, at least out here in Western Canada, many tourism offices are named “Visitor Information Centre” or the like. E.g. the Banff Visitor Centre, which provides information about the town and the greater national park around it, is an information=office as far as I’m concerned.