Why should you choose a Travel App to attract and engage travellers?
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Paper maps and printed guides had a good run; your visitors’ phones won them. For a destination or a DMO, a travel app is where the guide, the agenda, the map and the audio tour live together — and where you can reach visitors after they arrive. See how 40+ live destinations use theirs. What follows is what a destination gains from an app, and what yours should include:
1. Mobile Tourist Guide
95% of tourists use digital tools when searching for the best experience before, during and after traveling.
If you’re a tourist destinations that still relies on paper maps and guides, it’s time to start building your own travel app. Keep up with your travellers!
They want to have a Mobile Tourist Guide to plan ahead their itineraries, to discover unique experiences from your destination, to see high-quality photos and videos of the travel spot or save their favourite places to lists or share them with friends.
Besides the recommendations for the best places to visit and most popular events in your area, the Mobile Tourist Guide also provides useful info about public transport or cabs, to help them get around the destination more efficient.
The use of travel apps is so natural for tourists nowadays that you, as a DMO, can take advantage of this potent marketing tool. With these mobile tourist guides, visitors can discover points of interest nearby, explore parks, visit museums and book their tickets, find the best souvenir shops and coffee places and so much more …
2. Audio Guide
Add multilingual audio files to any point of interest, so visitors can experience your destination through storytelling. Visit Harghita, one of the wildest tourist regions of Transylvania, lets visitors discover its top attractions this way — in their own language, at their own pace, with no guide to book and no group to wait for.
3. Push Notifications
Usually, tourists install a travel app before a visit to a destination and after, they just delete it. But that doesn’t have to happen … if you can keep them engaged with Push Notifications.
They only need to tap the manual or automatic push notifications to go back into your travel app. Use any of the following opportunities to lead them back in to your “virtual destination“:
- New experiences: write short articles about experiences travellers can try in your destination.
- New places opened: gather a few newly opened places in your destination and write a short article with great photos
- Event reminder: send reminders to events that your users might be interested in.
- Tips & Tricks: if you just added some new features in the app, let your users know how they can better use them.
4. Easy bookings
Visitors plan on the phone, in one place. Your app should put everything plannable in front of them: opening hours and tickets information, event agendas, contact details for every venue, and direct links to the places where a booking actually happens. The app’s job is to remove the searching, not to replace your local businesses — the restaurant gets the reservation, the museum sells the ticket, and your platform is where the visitor found both.
5. Direct communication with your tourists
The feedback book at the information centre is gone, and good riddance. On a modern destination platform the conversation runs through two channels that actually scale: an AI assistant that answers visitors’ questions from your own published content, in their language, around the clock — and a helpdesk behind it, where everything the assistant cannot answer becomes a ticket someone on your team owns. Questions stop being lost emails; what visitors ask becomes what you publish next.
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