How to Attract Tourists With a Custom Mobile App?
Marketing a tourist destination is no easy feat: the booking rate depends on your venue, your marketing, the weather and the economy, and most of those are out of your hands. What is in your hands is how easily a visitor who noticed you can plan, arrive and enjoy the stay — and that is exactly the job of a destination’s own mobile app. Here is what an app changes, and which features actually matter.
Why Choose A Mobile App to Promote Your Tourist Destination?
There is an undeniable trend when it comes to travel apps in the tourism industry. Hotels, restaurants and tourist destinations worldwide are creating their own mobile apps, and so should you.
Tourism apps make the lives of tourists and business owners much easier. These centralized apps are more interactive and engaging compared to websites and offer more versatile functions.
So how exactly would you benefit from a travel app? Let’s take a look at our top 3 benefits below.
1. Make Your Brand Visible
A custom mobile app can reinforce your brand awareness on a local and global scale. It has the potential of showcasing your logo and messages on thousands of devices.
Besides the added visibility to your attraction, travel apps make a great first impression. You’re not just giving your prospects a boring website, but an interactive and engaging community hub.
Our apps’ core features & modules are designed to captivate the users and create a sense of community. Users can share their experiences, read reviews and make travel arrangements all within the app.
Last but not least, you’ll enjoy a giant improvement in notification open rates after centralizing your brand communication.
Having a Facebook page to keep your audience updated means getting lost in hundreds of social media notifications. With a tourism app, all your push notifications will be highlighted in the newsfeed.
And your audience will get used to receiving all your updates from your app.
2. Make Trip Planning Seamless
People organize whole trips on their phones. Your app’s role in that planning is to be the one place where the destination makes sense: what is open, what is on, how to get there, whom to call. Make the practical layer effortless and link visitors straight to the places where bookings happen — the easier the planning, the more likely the trip.
3. Improve Visitor Experience
A travel app is the best tool to improve your information segmentation. You can provide everything your tourists need from maps to events and other relevant information. Not to mention you can communicate any changes with instant push notifications.
Your app can also capture those all-important user reviews. The feedback will create value for the app users and help you improve your tourist attraction.
These will add up to a stellar visitor experience, and your tourists will reward you by re-visiting your business and recommending it to new customers.
Travel App Features That Attract Tourists
Now that the benefits of travel and tourism apps are clear, let’s get down to the nitty-gritty – the must-have features of any respectable travel app.
What are the features that tourists are really looking for? Find out which of them drive more traffic to your business, below.
1. Events and Local Offers
An agenda that is actually maintained is the strongest reason to keep an app installed. Local events with dates, places and reminders — and offers from local businesses published as content — give visitors a reason to open the app every day of their stay, and give your local partners a reason to love the platform.
2. Interactive Map
Geolocation is a must when it comes to travel apps. This will help tourists navigate around your attraction like it was their hometown.
Our interactive maps come with optimized nearby search filters, making it easy to find the nearest restaurant, supermarket, or hospital.
Offering tourists a complete in-app guide to your location will make them feel catered for. Additionally, your home won’t feel as foreign to them as it normally would – increasing their confidence in booking a trip.
3. Reviews and Community
Visitors trust other visitors. Reviews on points of interest create value twice: they guide the next tourist, and they tell you what to fix or celebrate. A community layer — favourites, follows, broadcasts to members — turns one-time visitors into an audience you can reach next season too.
Start Attracting Tourists Right Away
The truth is that attracting tourists with a dedicated mobile app is not difficult — it takes a solid platform and content worth opening. What it should not take is a development project.
On Eventya you start from a template, add your content, and get the official website and native iOS and Android apps from the same dashboard. We run Eventya on Eventya: we build our clients’ platforms in the same CMS we sell, every day. Create your destination — free · See live destinations · Pricing
