SKEMA Digital Marketing in Tourism and Events: Using augmented reality to sell more trips: the example of Marmara

Monday, 16 February 2015

Using augmented reality to sell more trips: the example of Marmara

Imagine a world in which you can quietly read your favorite tour operator’s brochure and put your travel wishes on a list, then easily switch to the website and buy the trip of your dreams. That is now possible with Marmara.

Thanks to the augmented reality, one can now read the Marmara brochure and book one’s trip. The brochure is referenced on the Overlay application that can be downloaded by customers on the App Store or on Google Play. Customers can read the brochure and select the products they like with their smartphones detecting them directly on the brochure. Then they can put them in a “shopping list” or directly switch to the Marmara website in order to learn more about specific information such as prices, availability, etc. This has lead Marmara to one of the companies which have the most consulted catalogues in only a few weeks. And this of course will lead to an increasing number of trip sales. But why such an increase?

First, 58% of the French online buyers book travel through the Internet according to the European Travel Commission. With that rate, tourism became the first e-commerce sector. E-tourism is in expansion, for bookings but also for travel planning. More and more companies develop their own online travel guides for their customers to answer the increasing demand of online and quick-to-obtain information. Linking the guide to the merchant site can be done easily with applications such as Overlay.

The opportunity to buy in only a few clicks also lead to a higher number of compulsive expenses. Indeed, studies have shown that if the customers have too many times to think or only a few times to spend on the web, they’ll forget about their first intuition quickly. If they have the opportunity to select tours and keep them in a list or to switch directly to the website, they will make more bookings. This idea of shopping list has been used by Marmara.

Finally, customers are more and more connected and online applications are now daily used by the majority of us. People gain a lot of time by using applications such as Overlay, and Marmara understood this and adapted itself to the demand, taking some advance on its competitors.

Marmara has been referenced on the Overlay application since the beginning of December 2014 and its brochure has already become one of the most-read ones. One can think than other tour operators will choose to follow its example in the near future.