Why should you choose a Travel App to attract and engage travellers?

These days are quite difficult for tourism destinations and DMOs. They are thinking of new ways to attract and engage travellers. One very potent solution is building or acquiring a travel app for their destination.

Paper maps and guides are replaced by interactive travel apps. These come with many benefits like : Recommendations & Experiences, Audio Guide, Push Notifications, Points of Interest and Services List, Events Agenda, Live Streaming and more …

After installing the travel app on their phone, tourists can have access to all kind of information:

points of interest they intent to visit
nearby maps
save their favourite places to lists
leave reviews
share interesting information with friends and family.

If you’re a DMO or tourism association and think of attracting more tourists to your destination with a mobile app, I’ll let you know about 5 essential features in a travel app.

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 multi-language audio files to any point of interest so that the tourists can experience your destination in the coolest possible way.

For example, Visit Harghita, one of the wildest touristic region of Transylvania, allows tourists to discover top attractions with the help of storytelling and audio guides.

Whilst there continues to be uncertainty surrounding the road out of the COVID-19 lockdown, DMOs believe that it is now essential to begin to build the post-crisis strategy that will speed up the recovery of the tourism sector. The Audio Guide Module offers cultural and tourist sites safe and hygienic solutions that foster social distancing and allow visitors to enjoy themselves autonomously.

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

More and more tourists like to plan their trip using only one travel app. It makes everything easier and they won’t have to switch to any other apps for various things.

In your travel app they can book their hotel room, buy online tickets to the museums they want to visit, call a cab or a travel guide for sightseeing, book a table at a new restaurant they discovered in the app or just get in touch with a place they want to see and check the time schedule … and so on.

5. Direct communication with your tourists

The days of written feedback in the tourist information centres or endless feedback forms on destination’s website are gone. DMOs can now get direct feedback and questions from travellers via chat.

Eventya platform offers it’s clients the possibility to integrate into their website a Facebook Chat connected to their Social Media account. Tourists can now instantly communicate with someone from your DMO and offer them assistance.

Another way to get to know your travellers and their preferences is to add a feedback form in your travel app. Easy to fill in for the tourists and offers great insights for your DMO.