Turning the tourist world upside down with the Outdooractive Travel Guide
It is no longer news that destination websites are playing less and less of a role and that industry platforms are taking over the servicing of guests, as is already common practice with package tours, accommodation, flights, table reservations, and rental cars. Right now, tour portals and portals for experiences are on the rise.
Exactly the same thing is happening with the rest of the trip planning information such as inspiration, information, current conditions, and navigation. Travel guides are being created on all the major platforms, and even Google is no longer sending users to destination websites once all the content has been picked up and integrated into the Google Knowledge Graph. Even open data, state databases, and federal knowledge graphs can’t do anything about that.
We at Outdooractive have found our own answer to this: We build a worldwide travel guide ourselves together with our destinations and all service providers. Outdooractive’s special positioning between a community platform and a B2B SaaS provider makes something unique possible: DMOs can build a powerful DMO platform together with us. We provide the technology and the DMOs fill it with content. We provide the reach and the DMOs take care of the guests. How does that sound?
The whole Outdooractive platform has been structured like a travel guide since the beginning. Outdooractive also generates 70% of its traffic from this. Most user search queries when planning a trip are “Hiking in Destination A” or “Cycling in Destination B” or “Farms in Destination C”. This structure is mapped in the Outdooractive travel guide as a native geographic page via polygons, with all political and tourist regions across 6 levels from continent to municipality. The regions are combined with up to 400 content categories to form all conceivable landing pages. Mountain regions, water regions, and protected areas are also stored as polygons. This means that the platform will always be better than agency websites in terms of usability and search engine rankings.
But the highlight is yet to come:
DMOs only have to enter the content into Outdooractive’s database. But they are not alone in this: All content in the region is played out in the guide, no matter who the content comes from. The new German term “crowdsourcing” describes exactly that: the community in the entire region takes care of the content together. This can be anyone from hoteliers to tour guides to restaurants. But content from publishers and organizations such as the Alpine clubs or hiking associations also join in the Outdooractive travel guide. The travel guide then builds up on its own. If enough content is published, then the landing pages are published automatically. If this content is available in other languages, the landing pages are also automatically published in other languages. The most relevant content floats to the top. So if a region has a particularly large number of swimming lakes, these are automatically displayed as highlights teasers on the region’s home page. In another region, this could be wellness offers or mountain bike tours.
The platform automatically detects the type of region, i.e. country, destination, municipality, mountain region, national park, etc. and intelligent algorithms choose the right page layout. All this happens without a single click, fully automatically. The DMO can still fully edit the guide, i.e. move, hide, add content, as well as edit text and images.
Now here’s the kicker:
The travel guide is also the destination’s website. With just a few clicks, the website is ready to go under your own domain. This gives you the following advantages:
- A state-of-the-art SaaS website with an unbeatable price. The platform technology is constantly updated and you never have to think about relaunches.
- Maintained once for 5 times the reach. Together, we generate at least 5x as much reach via the DMO’s brand and the concentrated power of the Outdooractive platform than the DMOs themselves achieve.
- Community integrated: Together we generate community engagement, user profiles for personalized communication, and digital visitor guidance.
- The DMO app thus becomes the most important mobile marketing, planning, and visitor guidance tool based on the travel guide, of course.
To illustrate:
If you’re curious, have a look directly at the representation of your own region in the travel guide on Outdooractive.
The optimization will progress in the coming weeks. If you have already integrated the travel guide on your site and have detailed questions about the new design, please contact your project manager directly.