How Travel Tech Puts Destinations on the Map

Raising awareness or building compelling content around destinations that are newly offered, remote or struggle with mixed perception can be a challenge for travel brands. But through emerging tech and improvements in mobile platforms, brands can provide experiences that let consumers explore far-flung locales without having to leave their homes, letting them intimately learn about a place through immersive storytelling. 

According to a report from Expedia Group, one third of Latin American Gen-Z and millennial travelers perform the entire travel shopping journey via mobile devices. The finding showcases the importance in offering mobile experiences that streamline the decision-making process through value adds, attention-seeking imagery and tie-in to social platforms.

Know Your Audience & Grab Their Attention

In essence, brands can better reach these young travelers through mobile moments: the points at which users turn to their devices to seek inspiration or answer a question. Brands can achieve this by adopting a mobile-first mindset when designing user experiences. Start by thinking about the context through which consumers engage with their devices.

Next Destination: Our 2019 Travel Trends Report

When Edelman sought to promote Hawaii as a destination, they targeted busy New Yorkers on their daily commutes—a key moment in which users are staring at their phones.  With an attractively redesigned MetroCard directing users to an elegant mobile site, the campaign intervenes with commuters’ daily grind to inspire a sense of wanderlust. Produced by MediaMonks, the mobile site lets users discover each of the archipelago’s islands in stunning visual detail before entering a drawing to win a free trip. In addition to its visual design, another strength of the campaign is how well it “gets” its local New York audience and situates itself within their daily routine.

Innovate through Scalable Experiences

With competition shifting its focus to mobile as well, it can be a challenge for travel brands to stand out. But investing in emerging technologies or supporting new social platform features provide opportunities for brands to reach consumers in fascinating and noteworthy ways. Take airline brand KLM for example, which is no stranger to using mobile AR to transport users to another place.

MediaMonks worked with the brand to innovate even further by offering AR advertising directly within Facebook’s newsfeed—a feature that isn’t yet available to the public. The ads invite users to open a virtual door as they scroll past, which activates a 360-degree photo allowing users to view landmarks from different angles by moving their device. The immersive content focuses on new or lesser-known destinations serviced by the airline brand, making use of the technology to drive awareness and allow users to almost literally stumble into a brand-new environment.

A similar example is STC’s “Unveil Saudi” series of VR experiences. STC isn’t a travel brand—the content serves to showcase the strength of its network—but it does an excellent job of letting users inhabit remote landmarks in stunning 360-degree video. Users can enjoy the content by strapping their device to a VR headset, or simply drag their cursor to control the view on desktop. This versatility showcases an important consideration for immersive storytelling: it’s easily scalable and accessible to audiences.

Reap the Full Potential of Mixed Reality

The strategies above are great for raising awareness about destinations or pique consumers’ curiosity about a place. But what better way is there to showcase a travel destination than by giving consumers the opportunity to really feel as if they were there?

A best-in-class example of bringing the destination directly to consumers is the 4D trishaw ride in VR that we developed with TBWA for the Singapore Tourism Board. Users strap into a real trishaw equipped with a VR headset, which transports them to Singapore’s hustle-and-bustle. The trishaw makes for an excellent vehicle—excuse the pun—for such an experience, as participants inhabit the role of a passenger.

By focusing their gaze in different directions, users can choose the path they want to take. Along the way, spatial sounds, vibrations and scents provide a multi-sensory, immersive experience that makes users feel like they’re really there. This type of experience won’t be practical for every brand; as an installation, it makes a better fit at trade shows, for example. But travel brands that want to make an event out of highlighting a destination (like a tourism board) can benefit greatly from the technology.

Improvements in emerging tech and consumers’ favorite social networks provide new opportunities for brands to connect with audiences and inform them about their services or destinations. By letting users inhabit or explore an immersive location—whether it be just a quick moment on their phone or a lengthy drive through a city in VR—brands can raise awareness in compelling ways and increase their digital maturity.