Why Regional Tourism must come Together!

 

“Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, and working together is success”

A very wise Henry Ford once famously quoted that “coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress and working together is success”, it worked for him turning him into a very successful business leader. For regional tourism this has never been truer and now is the time to regions to come together, work together, promote together and avail of the technological tools together.

Tourism post CoVid?

CoVid-19 will ask a lot of questions of the tourism industry, mainly how to survive in the aftermath of the virus. For individual attractions, the most difficult question is how to engage with our visitors and still give them a full experience. Quite often this is through guided tours, which will always be the best experience with a personal twist of the guide, but are visitors going to want to or be allowed to walk around in large groups? Will visitors be comfortable handling rented audio-guides?

Coming Together a Key Factor for Success

Coming Together will be a key factor to success developing a region-wide, feature rich digital solution that will be centrally marketed and removing multiple individual development costs. Very often small to medium tourism attractions are put off developing a digital offering due to restrictive development costs. The other digital “difficulty” for small to medium attractions comes in the form of marketing and how to fight through the digital “crowd” and get into the hands of the visitor. For the visitor this can often be a complicated and time-consuming journey, having to download multiple individual digital solutions that often disappoint with a feature-light solution and negative experiences, mainly due to budgetary constraints of an attraction.

Digital offerings, enabling visitors to use their own devices will be one of the key factors for regional tourism authorities and attractions. Digitalisation provides the tools, frameworks, and technologies to create and/or add value to tourism products and experiences, but the success of digitalisation really depends on the capacity of the region to share, learn and collaborate.

Doing things Differently

Developing a region wide strategy using an anchor attraction to get visitor to the region but then once there, to encourage the visitor to visit some other local lesser known attractions, enables the whole region to benefit. One way to do this is to build campaigns around loyalty, rewarding visitors with a sponsored meal/drink at a local establishment based on the amount of attractions visited in a certain time frame. This will encourage visitors to spend more time, maybe even overnight, in a region, not just visit the anchor attraction and move on.

Smart Tourism

Smart Tourism refers to the application of information and communication technology, for developing innovative tools and approaches to improve tourism. Tourism is a key component of any smart city or region strategy and is one of the major components of economic growth. Smart Tourism is about digitally integrating attractions and regions, engaging positively with the visitors whilst enhancing their experiences through technology.

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 that they can use on their own devices.

So, Coming Together & Working Together is how Regional Tourism will create the ingredients for success……it worked for Henry!

In a series of posts, over the coming weeks, I will discuss the other additional features and benefits of our Smart Tourism platform

• The Smart Attraction – using digital technologies to adapt to the new realities such digital guides, digital feedback engagement and positive interactivity
• Campaign & Loyalty Management – how to encourage visitor to stay longer within a region to benefit attractions and the greater tourism community
• Cross Marketing and Community – digital strategies that can benefit everyone
• Our FXM component – Big data and feedback experience management component, how to use the data