Outdooractive Business - Blog #Map

Building greater resilience through digitization Digitizing your guests

Wed, 17 Nov 2021 14:31:26 +0100

When distance make it difficult to get to know people in person, digitizing your guests is a necessary step to help sustain your business. Outdooractive provides you with the tools you need to ensure you are securely positioned for the future.

Every destination and every hotel wants to offer visitors and guests the best service. This is only possible if you are able to understand the personal needs of your visitors and make the effort to build a digital relationship with them before they arrive. Digital and sustainable, two-way communication as well as customer loyalty are the key to this.

How do you gain the trust of your guests and go about obtaining their data?

Relevant and personalized content based on the guests’ personal preferences increases interest and loyalty to the platform. The frequency of bookings grows and with it the possibility to collect relevant data from guests. Detailed guest profiles are created voluntarily through the registration process. Outdooractive offers this service nationwide and can also track guest data beyond the borders of a destination creating a foundation for understanding the market and being able to make forecasts for the future.

We create profiles for each user and permanently enrich them with data that is relevant to offering a personalized service. Each user retains full control over his or her data, can withdraw their consent at any time and delete the profile completely. Compliance with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) promotes users trust in how their data is handles and used.

Outdooractive’s full-service white-label community solution is seamlessly integrated into all front-end products. The system is centrally managed by the Outdooractive Community Team, which deals with all questions from users as well as all infringements, spam and troubleshooting.

The data of all users who have registered in your front-end applications can be viewed in your business access and is automatically synchronized into your CRM.

The Outdooractive platform provides a number of options that you can use to create digital profiles of your guests. Reasons for a guest to register include challenges, ratings and comments, FAQs, competitions, and much more.

Offer your guests the best service and give them a direct added value with a gift of 4 weeks of Pro+ service.

Upon registration, the data will be directly transferred to your CRM, giving you the opportunity to use it for further services. This can be done once a booking is confirmed with a guest card, on your website and at other touch point.

Digitizing your guests is key to becoming more resilient in times of crisis and opens up additional flexibility in the future.

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Guiding hikers and protecting grazing livestock with Outdooractive

Wed, 17 Nov 2021 14:27:40 +0100

During hikes in the Alpine region, incidents with mother cows and guard dogs occur more and more often. The animals are exposed to enormous stress in the process and the confrontations may lead to accidents. In order to counteract this problem, Graubünden, in cooperation with Outdooractive, has initiated an innovative pilot project.

One animal per herd have been equipped with a transmitter that transmits the animal’s location to a server every 30 minutes. This information is transferred to the Outdooractive platform within 24 hours. Afterwards, the pastures used are shown to visitors and the owners of the animals on the map.

This enables Graubünden to inform outdoor sports enthusiasts before they start their route and to guide them specifically to safe areas where no grazing animals will be disturbed. A QR code attached to fences on site, serve those who decide on a spontaneous trip to share the data and find information quickly. In the future some grazing animals will also be equipped with transmitters on around 8.000 alpine pastures in Austria. The transmitted information will be visible in the online hiking maps of the Alpine Club and will be transferred to all Outdooractive maps.

In the long term, conflicts between agriculture and tourism can be minimized and mutual understanding expanded.

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Avoid overcrowded trails with digitized route suggestions

Wed, 17 Nov 2021 14:24:19 +0100

The search for routes and activities in a region nowadays mainly takes place online. This is also confirmed by a study by Bergzeit, which shows that 65% of hikers from the DACH region inform themselves about possible destinations for their excursions on online portals. Here, the best-known routes are usually presented in detail. One of the reasons for this is that tourism regions have so far focused their marketing efforts mainly on highlighting top routes. This now creates the problem that these routes are communicated, commented on and recommended via a wide variety of channels. The logical consequence is that visitors are drawn to already overcrowded routes. Thus, all visitors continue to gather on the same paths and the expected recreational effect is gone. And yet this loop can be solved so easily.

Potential visitors only need to be made aware of other routes in the region. This can be achieved if even unknown routes are adequately described and thus automatically suggested during the online search.

With the Outdooractive Business Account, destinations can create these routes in an uncomplicated and almost self-explanatory way. The more detailed the routes are described and the more information they contain, the higher they will be displayed in the search. Destinations can also integrate these digitized route descriptions on their own websites. Landing pages on the Outdooractive platform for specific activities present the diversity of the region even more clearly to the more than 11 million users (e.g. biking or hiking).

With these digital solutions, destinations can actively guide visitors along new paths and proactively avoid streams of visitors gathering in one place. It is important that DMOs become active and digitally present their regions and the offers available. This is the only way to create qualitative content that reaches potential visitors and provides sufficient information.

3D Flight Video 2.0 Let your guests widen your reach

Tue, 16 Nov 2021 13:16:04 +0100

With Outdooractive's new 3D Flight Videos, Pro+ users can now create high-quality videos of a route they have recorded in a single click. Furthermore, they now have the ability to share these experiences on social media. By letting visitors act as influencers you have a whole new way to market your destination.

Greater reach through new users

Guests at your destination must first create an account to use this feature. Registration can be done via the destination's White-label website and White-label app, automatically making them members of the destination's branded community and leads. In short, communication take place using the destination's brand.

Qualitative data for digital visitor guidance

In order to create the videos, users will need to record their route. This data is transferred to the Destination Heatmap, which our customers can access via their Outdooractive Business Account. The information generated creates stats that can be used to further improve visitor guidance.

Attention for your region

The videos can be downloaded and shared thousands of times via social media channels such as Instagram, Facebook and YouTube. Prospective visitors who see the video are directed to the destination website for more information. In addition, destinations have the opportunity to create 3D Flight Videos with the Outdooractive Business Account and upload them via their own social media channels. This allows DMOs to become active themselves and use this tool to reach new guests.

The world's first Live Tracking Heatmap for digital visitor guidance systems

Tue, 16 Nov 2021 07:35:28 +0100

Outdooractive brings you the first live view of guests, combining data from hardware tracking with GPS-positioning, to support destinations manage their guests. Here we give you a first look at some of the effective features of the first version, which is available for order now.

About the Heatmap: Live View and Map View feature

A prerequisite for targeted and up-to-date visitor guidance is to know the current occupancy rate at hotspots and predict potential guest volumes.

GPS positioning from Outdooractive mobile and buddy beacon users are combined with live WiFi tracking from destination.one and other hardware trackers including bike counters, parking, etc. We have integrated all sources directly on the platform, resulting in a visualized heat map or "popularity index.

The Live View feature, (pictured below) anonymously displays the live volume of Outdooractive user locations between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. on a sunny Saturday in April.

The Map View feature can be used to actively monitor which areas are currently being viewed by mobile users to predict guests' future travel destinations and forecast possible traffic volume scenarios.

When using different methods of data collection and tracking systems, the data is collected in a DSGVO compliant manner.

What to expect and added features still to come

Later additions will include increased data view optionsas well as the ability to access historical data to improve the products for destinations. On that basis, users will also be able to forecast crowd trends and become better prepared when making travel decisions.

Additional count-data map layersthrough the interface of Eco-Counter, as well as increased hardware and software support tailored to destination-specific needs i.e. activity trend reports and annual histories, foot-traffic level tracking for planning and managing investments, and much moreÂ are in development.

We will keep you posted on the exciting details. To take advantage of the live tracking heat map, please contact us at: business@outdooractive.com.

Keeping your guests safe throughout the winter season

Sat, 01 May 2021 08:31:00 +0200

Winter is starting to get underway bringing with it familiar issues. These include all the mountain rescues that need to undertaken to help lost skiers who misjudged the snow conditions and went out on their ski tour with the wrong equipment.

Ski touring has seen an huge increase in popularity over the last year which has led to a lot of newcomers heading out into snow-covered mountains. However, despite there being many platforms available for finding out info ahead of their trips, data on current snow conditions apparently do not always filter through, resulting too often in tragic accidents.

Outdooractive's Avalanche Report and Weather and Snow map style are ideal tools for visitors to find out about conditions at their destination before setting off on their ski tour.

This is also where destinations can do the work of providing this up-to-date information to their visitors by ensuring it is directly to hand. The detailed route descriptions of Outdooractive, make it possible to integrate current information while also providing a comprehensive equipment list. Users have the option of being able to display layers directly on the map of the route that forecasts snowfall and they can read the detailed Avalanche Report. On Outdooractive, your guests will find everything in one place that allows them to respond to warnings at an early stage, without major hurdles, and then reschedule if necessary.

This is how destinations can proactively mitigate the risk of accidents and give their visitors a safe start to the winter season.

Take action now and revise your tour descriptions:

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