SMARTening up your Attraction!

In this post we are going to look at how to ‘SMARTen’ up your attraction. Smart Tourism is about digitally integrating attractions and regions, engaging positively with the visitors whilst enhancing their experiences through technology. Tourism is a key component of any smart regional strategy and is one of the major components for regional economic growth.

But CoVid-19 is asking a lot of questions of the tourism industry, mainly how to survive in the aftermath of the pandemic. For individual attractions, the most difficult question is how to engage with our visitors and still give them a full experience. Will visitors want or be allowed to walk around in large groups? How can we give them a guided experience?

What makes an attraction SMART?

Making an attraction Smart will undoubtedly enhance the visitor experience and is also very affordable. You need to offer a multi-feature digital solution that enables visitors to access content either through their own device or other digital devices, although since CoVid-19 it is predicted that most visitors will be more comfortable using their own device and refrain from using rental devices.

Some of the more popular features in Smart attractions enable the visitor to self-guide either through an audio or video tour guide and these have become even more important since CoVid-19. Language options, clear route-mapping navigation, interactive communication between visitor and attraction, interactivity with existing social media channels, important information on the venue and local area, such as mobility/facilities and the gathering of valuable visitor data and usage patterns.

Very often small to medium tourism attractions are put off developing a digital offering due to restrictive development costs, and if they do, they tend to end up with a disappointing feature-light solution with no ‘Smart’ features, which in turn leads to a negative experience.

The other digital “difficulty”, for small to medium attractions, comes in the form of marketing and how to navigate through the digital “crowd” and get into the hands of the visitor.

What is the answer?

Well, there is not just one answer, but doing things differently will certainly help. A major key factor to success is the development of a regional-wide ‘Smart’ solution with your local tourism authority, in collaboration with your other tourist attraction colleagues. Through collaboration some of the main advantages are:

• Reducing costs with by sharing the development costs between the region and your local attraction colleagues
• Standard features for all attractions, with the flexibility of attractions to add additional features
• A singular centralised marketing campaign, which is what the tourism authorities are very good at
• Encourage visitors to spend more time, maybe overnight, in a region by build campaigns around loyalty e.g. rewarding visitors with a sponsored meal/drink offer at a local establishment based on the amount of attractions visited in a certain time frame.

From the visitor perspective, a single interactive digital touchpoint makes for a highly positive experience. Far too often it can be a complicated and time-consuming journey, having to download multiple individual digital solutions that often disappoint with a feature-light solution.

Now is the perfect time to ‘SMARTen’ up, collaborate and get digital.

This is where Integrated Worlds ‘Smart Tourism Platform’ comes into its own. Our ‘Smart Tourism Platform’ creates a strong tourism proposition through regional collaboration between the attractions, giving them an affordable, interactive and sustainable digital footprint. Whilst giving the visitors a feature-rich digital solution which they can use on their own devices.

Andrew is European Sales Manager for Integrated Worlds GmbH and for more information contact Andrew at andrew.dunne@integrated-worlds.com