Wemap @ Skift Global Forum
Thoughts on the new and inventive ways that leading actors in the travel sector and leveraging personalization, locaiton and experiences.
We had the pleasure of attending the 2017 Skift Global Forum in NYC in late September, and since then, it’s been a blur of activity keeping up with all of the new contacts made there as well as integrating the lessons learned during the sessions as well as during casual conversations during the confrence.
The travel industry is one of the largest and oldest industries in the world, representing in direct and indirect spending a staggering 10% of global GDP according to the World Travel Council.
Even seemingly new innovations are often the resulting of applying new technology to old problems.
Airbnb, for example, is the modern incarnation and technologically sophisticated version of home-sharing that’s been a part of civilization for hundreds and hundreds of years.
In this always evolving yet age-old space, and with ever increasing numbers of travelers; it is more critical than ever that companies and destinations deliver personalized content to their cusotmers.
Though we were impressed by all of the speakers present, we’ve selected a few videos that speak to how different actors in the travel and tourism space are leveraging personalization and location to grow.
- Personalized experiences based on user-profiles and location as a way to drive new revenues. As Nathan Blecharczyk explains during his talk with Rafat Ali, local experiences represent one of the next growth engines for Airbnb.
2. Highlighting unique local experiences and flavors is part of the mission statement for local and national destination marketing officers. Every destination is unique and conveying that uniqueness as part of an ongoing conversation and branding is critical for established markets like Los Angeles as well as emerging markets like Colombia and Jordan.
3. In an increasingly competitive market, building and maintaining loyalty is job one. As Delta Airlines CEO Ed Bastian explains, initiatives big-and-small have a profound impact on keeping your best (and often most valuable) customers happy because customers trust your brand.
4. As customer expectations change, the importance of connectivity and authenticity are increasingly important to travelers. The ‘bucket list’ is no longer the prevailing approach to travel, now experiencing something ‘local’ that speaks to passions drives most travelers’ choices and playing a role in those conversations is critical for successful brands.
The focus on providing guests, visitors or just the curious with an intuitive way to not only learn more about a given area — points of interest, restaurants, bars, monuments, events, and more — but also to tie useful services into these moments of discovery — itinerary creation, ride-hailing, room-booking, reservations, deliveries, and more — is at the heart of Wemap’s mission.
By enabling entities from across the travel sector to use their own content to build truly useful smart maps in minutes, Wemap enables our partners to deliver personalized and localized content across their digital platforms.
Examples of our successful endeavors to empower travel and tourism entities to build smart maps abound and are growing more numerous by-the-day. We’re excited to use the knowledge and connections made at the Skift Global Forum to help accelerate those efforts every day.
If you’re interested in seeing how your content can be transformed into a user-focused, service-orientated smart map, please contact us today @ sales@getwemap.com
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Wemap developed a breakthrough map technology that has been adopted in a few months by global leaders like Le Parisien, Hachette and ministère de la Culture et de la Communication. The French-American start-up is building a smart maps platform to offer individuals and organizations a bridge to the real world: combining meaningful information and practical services. Wemap combines an intuitive user experience and a powerful tool to connect a map to any sources and publish it. By empowering publishers to create and embed live maps with their content in minutes, Wemap has already reached 4 million monthly viewers of its maps.
To learn more about Wemap’s technology: https://getwemap.com.
