One of the frequently asked questions - does a tourist company need a website? Indeed, you can have pages on Facebook or Instagram, be pointed on electronic maps, and it seems like website is not needed. Similarly, if we consider hotels, you can place information on Booking.com or Tripadvisor and also do not have your website. It is appropriate for some businesses but tourism has its own features. 1. The average bill in the tourism sector is quite high, so potential customers are more responsible in choosing a product and absence of website of a hotel or travel agency might cause concern. 2. According to studies, before making a purchase a tourist visits an average of 37 sites. What happens if among these sites no one is yours – it Is obviously. 3. As already mentioned – the main selling tool in tourism is trust. Having a good professional website will only strengthen it, since only a stable and well-organized company that cares for its reputation can create and maintain a

Recently, there are a lot of talks on the future of tourism, some expensive space technologies are supposed, although, in our opinion, the future is already here and technically everything is ready for it. The fact is that, traveling is working with information, its processing, sorting and perception. Technically, today you can submit any information online. For example, to find a hotel or an airline ticket without leaving your home, all you need is a credit card. In order not to get lost in an unfamiliar city – you need just a smartphone with an installed map application. To overcome the language barrier - there is also enough an interpreter application in a smartphone, the Internet and some use skill. Moreover, these technologies can significantly save resources, such as paper, as well as travelers’ time and money. Therefore, we would like to address to all museums, DMOs and tourism organizations – to make the future come sooner and tourists can fully use your servi

Due to the growth of world tourism, many museums and visit centers are faced with the lack of guides problem . Guides who speak their native language or English, albeit with an accent, usually enough, but lack of guides speaking other languages is a problem. Moreover, a guide should not only know historical information and speak language well, but for a more complete and interesting presentation of tourist sights, he should be a bit of an artist, a bit of a reciter and, of course, a storyteller. Nowadays, the demand for such workers in many industries is quite high, so it is not surprising that there are not enough good multilingual guides, and this problem will only increase with the growth of tourist flows. The solution is the use of automatic audio guides, for example, izi.TRAVEL, when professional guides, writers, local historians, storytellers and translators take part in creating content, and then tourists download these stories to their smartphones an unlimited number of t

Nowadays, it is impossible for businesses not to be on the Internet, especially for tourism. Moreover, for example, when buying a car, client can visit a car dealership and touch this car with his hands, but in the case of a hotel, airline or tour - client makes a decision to buy or refuse it thousands of kilometers away. Especially in tourism, because, according to various studies, a tourist can visit 30-35 different websites before the trip. Stakeholders face a natural question: how to make sure that their website is visited. Of course, website should not cause any complaints about the quality of content, be unique, load quickly and contain no technical errors. However, there are still opportunities for cooperation with third-party services. One of them is Google My Business. If someone searches for a hotel or travel agency in a certain place, he gets this kind of business. Another possibility is Tripadvisor, where people go just before the trip. Now Tripadvisor is

In our opinion, the main sales factor in tourism is trust, and it doesn’t matter what is the tourist’s choice: a country, hotel, airline or museum. Indeed, the most important resource of a traveler is time, and nobody wants to waste it. That is why tourist does not want to waste time on uninteresting, boring and unreliable activity. Moreover, a potential tourist is looking for service providers who will not disappoint him or spoil such a long-awaited vacation. However, how to gain the trust of a tourist, when he is not able to make physical contact with the product and located thousands of kilometers away from the service provider. This is high-quality content on website, social networks and basically on the Internet plus reviews of people who have been there. The second is even more important. Considering content, it is as important as people love not just statements that your business is the best, but proof of this statement. That is why travel agencies and museums should

Tourist reviews in social networks and on various travel sites are very important for travel companies, hotels and museums, because in the world of wide Internet interaction, before booking hotel or tour, tourists always watch reviews and make a decision based on the opinions of random people, who actually visited this place. Many tour companies, hotels and travel services come up with various tricks for tourists to write good reviews in social networks, booking systems and travel sites. Some offer free services, some just ask, some offer bonuses, better accommodation, etc. In our opinion, this is not promising, because it does not help to improve the service at all, does not lead to an improvement in the perception of this object by tourists, and therefore does not lead to improvement of reviews in the long term, but only diverts resources to useless work. Review is a materialized perception of a company by tourist or his appraisal of an existing image. Obviously, the

It is strange that world community still don’t notice high paper consumption in tourism. Each tourist consumes minimum 1kg of paper during a travel. It includes maps, guidebooks, dictionaries, flight tickets and hotel bookings.  if we consider that the total number of tourists in the world is more than 1 billion per year, hence tourism industry spends about 1 million tons of paper per year. Moreover, this million travels together  with tourists by planes and trains which results in excessive fuel consumption. If we add printing expenses, it is some more billion dollars per year.    In our opinion, technologies of smart tourism could solve the problem: 1. Using electronic audio guides and guidebooks instead of paper ones 2. Using electronic maps on the phone instead of paper ones 3. Using translation apps instead of paper dictionaries These solutions don’t need any financial investments, they need only promotion of the technologies of smart tourism among travelers. D