Digitalisation of Tour products

At non-peak times of the day, Pal.mar realised it had a pool of un-booked cars waiting for jobs. Their management team determined a need to better maximise the operating-hours of these vehicles, so considered marketing a sightseeing experience to tourists. The problem was that their drivers were not sightseeing experts, nor were they multilingual. Also, small group tours by minibus are generally unaffordable for two reasons: local guides are inordinately expensive and they will always require one of the available 8 seats, reducing the number of places available to tourists. From a visitor perspective, the only affordable sightseeing option was the cheaper Hop-on Hop-off buses.

Pal.mar worked in close liaison with the POPGuide team to develop specially tailored digital tours of Rome. Multi-language audio-commentary of 100s of points of interest was created by the POPGuide team, using facts and stories compiled by local experts and art historians. They mapped special sightseeing routes using the POPGuide navigation software and studied the perfect approach distance to allow the commentary to auto-play on the guests’ smartphones as the drivers followed the itineraries. What’s more, the audio, texts and images remain with the guests after their visit as a talking postcard, or a long-term souvenir, encouraging the word-of-mouth promotion of the Pal.mar experience.