Guest in the City – the Airbnb of the leisure industry?

Guest in the City is a collaborative platform allowing French or foreign tourists to book meals and activities with French locals (cooking class, wine tasting, guided tours…). The objective is to offer a friendlier kind of tourism and authentic experiences with locals. People from different nationalities can meet and share their culture and way of living.

The website has been launch in October 2015 by Frank & Véronique Prabel, co-founder of Guest in the City. They decided to develop this project because they found that it is not always easy to meet the locals when travelling. Guest in the City offers a connection between the tourists and the hosts wishing to share their passions or welcome people at their places.  

 Source: http://www.guestinthecity.com/

Everybody can become a member of the Guest in the City community. You can be a French tourist but also an inhabitant of a neighborhood wishing to book and share an activities or dinner with a host staying in your area. In the future the platform would like to expand to the BtoB market and attract cultural or sportive event manager looking for new places, rooms or activities for their events.

But how does it work?  
The tourists or users of the platform can book their activities and pay the price fixed by the hosts directly on the site.

Source: http://www.guestinthecity.com/

Guest in the City takes a commission of 15% on the amount paid by the customers as the service fees but the hosts do not need to pay to publish a post. Each host is selected and validated by the team of Guest in the City to create a community in which tourists and users of the platform can trust and to assure the quality of the services offered. All the posts are available in French and English to increase the number of potential bookings.

100 posts are now available on the platform (April 2016). The objective of the team of Guest in the City is to reach 300 posts by the end of 2016 and more than 1,000 post by the end of 2017.

Surfing on the “collaborative economy” wave, this new start up offers an easy way to give a new dimension to our travels. Useful for both international and national travellers this concept allows travellers to be closer to locals and to discover more about the habits of the place they are visiting. For now, the start up is only starting to work and focus mostly on France but can easily expand to be used for other countries and offer more activities. 

Lucile BESSON & Léa MARET

Sources:

http://www.tourmag.com/Guest-in-the-City-veut-devenir-le-Airbnb-du-loisir_a79811.html

http://www.guestinthecity.com/fr/

http://bonjouridee.com/guestinthecity/

Crowdsourcing in favor of Tourism campaigns

Crowdsourcing in favor of Tourism campaigns

“When thousand heads are better than one”

Who better to promote a destination than people living there during all year? Who better to give some touristic “tips” to travelers than people who have already visited the destination? That is what Crowdsourcing is all about.

What is crowdsourcing?

Jeff Howe and Mark Robinson from Wired Magazine have first developed Crowdsourcing in 2006. It consists in using, in a collaborative mode, users’ creativity, knowledge, know-how and experiences. This emergent trend is used by several markets and more and more by the tourism industry. Indeed, millions of surfers are willing to give their opinion online and consequently, to share personal experiences. By seeing the wealth of content and exchanges generated on the Internet by customers, in some country, tourism authorities and DMOs jumped at the chance to solicit web users. Consumer has now become to the service of the business.

Significant campaign examples:

- Tourism Authority of Thailand (TAT) launches a campaign called “The Most Amazing Show on Earth”. Past travelers are invited to upload some pictures, videos, stories on a dedicated website. Thanks to these real experiences, TAT will develop a movie in order to promote Thailand in a more realistic way.

- Washington tourism officials have created an online marketing campaign called “Share your Washington”. This campaign mainly focuses on Washington residents who will have to invite relatives and send them some online postcards. This method will help residents participating in the economic development of their city.

- “Talk for Ireland” is focused on social media participation with a competition and weekly prize to win. This dedicated Facebook page encourages people to post and share videos of attractive activities and areas in Ireland. This campaign motivates travelers thanks to a prize depending on how passionate was the description of Ireland.

Crowdsourcing are being crucial for tourism campaigns. Indeed, companies can take advantage of this trend by increasing their destination visibility, by accessing to a market more quickly (thanks to residents’ relatives for instance), or even reducing marketing costs. However, companies shouldn’t use this trend for every campaign theme, as they have no control on the content of information uploaded by online users.

In other words, even if crowdsourcing has become an unavoidable way of promoting better a destination by using the “power of the crowd”, tourism professionals should be aware that “bad buzz” can happen on the dedicated website create for advertising.

Sources:
http://www.toposophy.com/blogs/blog/?bid=191

http://veilletourisme.ca/2009/09/04/le-crowdsourcing-quand-des-milliers-de-tetes-valent-mieux-qu%E2%80%99une/

Sevan Karaoghlanian
Patrick Rakotondrajao