Tourisme Montréal announced on January 18th that it has signed a partnership with the location-based social networking platform, Gowalla, to promote Montréal's neighbourhoods, businesses and attractions. (http://
www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/January2011/18/c3382.html)
The partnership will allow Tourisme Montréal to create a custom branded presence, making Montréal the first city in Canada to
officially enter the fast-growing arena of social check-in networks.
Based in Austin, Texas, Gowalla was launched in 2009 by Josh Williams and Scott Raymond. Gowalla is a mobile and web service that gives people around the world a new way to communicate and express themselves through the everyday places and memorable settings they enjoy. People can capture and share their spot in the world with friends and family, while discovering new places, events and trips as they go. Gowalla offers businesses, campaigns, and organizations the unique opportunity to reward loyalty, reach new consumers, and to create memorable experiences.
"Tourisme Montréal has always been an early adopter of new technologies and with the huge increase in the use of location-based social networks over the past year, we saw this as a great opportunity to enhance the visitor experience and promote our members," said Pierre Bellerose, Vice President, Public Relations, Product Research and Development for Tourisme Montréal. "Gowalla's user-friendly interface and integration of other location platforms makes it easy for visitors to discover Montréal in a whole new light."
By following Tourisme Montréal on Gowalla, users can see five "Trips" - itinerary ideas - for five different neighbourhoods, with historical facts and trivia for the various places that make up the Trip. If a user checks in at three places in any given Trip, they earn a Montréal-branded stamp.
Indeed, it’s no surprise to see the large impacts of social networks and it's no shock that the travel industry has spent the past several years trying to tap into the site's social-networking power. While many of us are still using these sites to waste time at work, a small but savvy group of travelers are increasingly turning their online networks into a travel think tank.
What’s more, some ambitious agencies and planners have tried creating travel-specific applications that can be used on these sites. Gowalla is, therefore, a good example that creates a new concept by introducing “check-in aggregation”, letting people build their own travel itineraries to share with friends.
The industry development and the rising expectations of tourists have both pushed the technology forward from e-tourism to m-tourism with visitors not being satisfied anymore with a single platform online, but a combined one with both online networks and their mobile devices. They now prefer to rely on mobile travel-related applications during their trips to guarantee a unique destination experience.
Here comes the era of m-tourism, industry practitioners, let’ keep up with the Jones!
Key words: m-tourism; social check-in network; mobile technology
Pictures retrieved from: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/gowalla
Posted by RONG Jia & LI Yang
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