Welcome City Lab, the innovative incubator for tourism solutions.

Paris is the most visited destination for worldwide visitors, yet preserving this pole position requires a certain amount of constant adaptations in the tourism sector, especially concerning IT technologies.

To do so, the city of Paris has recently taken the decision to support the Welcome City Lab, an incubator for finding innovative solutions for the tourism industry. According to Laurent Queige, general secretary of Welcome City Lab, international visitors are often surprised to receive a welcoming not as gentle as they could have expected from what France and especially Paris inspires to the world. To improve international visitors’ experience, Laurent Queige supports the Smart City project that aims at developing online applications to gather the city of Paris and international tourists’ interests.

A large part of the researches and experimentations focus on the personalization of the experience with applications such as WeGuideYou or even Meetrip. This first type of application is an online payable service for foreign travelers to meet a Parisian, according to their respective interests and spoken languages, to experience the destination with a local guide.

Another type of personalization application, Optionizr, provides extra time reflection before making a final decision that should have normally be taken immediately, such as promotional flights. The Welcome City Lab has also developed Toot Sweet to gather in one application all activities available in the surrounding of the mobile device.

Welcome City Lab has developed partnerships not only with IT providers but also with transportation companies such as Air France or RATP. In fact, the Welcome City Lab is experimenting on the route Paris Toulouse of Air France on-boards tablets providing tourism contents of the destination. The same concept is extending to RATP with tablets on stations to provide information.

Another type of mobile application, SmartSantanderRA, focalizes its efforts on virtual reality to enable international visitors to have a look of how the city of Paris looked decades ago with their mobile device. This technology is now extending to other regions of France such as Bordeaux.

Finally, and maybe most importantly, to enable international visitors to connect to these online applications, the city of Paris and Welcome City Lab concentrate on providing secured and efficient Wi-Fi. Thus, a company named Peeble has developed hotspots with 4G technologies across Paris. To maintain its competitiveness, the city of Paris continues to invest in IT technologies in the tourism sector.

Anthony Calzi & Camille Salomon