How can Councils and Tourism Centres use FreeGuides?
FreeGuides recognises councils and governments are always trying to promote their amazing cities and sights to travellers and locals. Sometimes this can be hard or daunting especially post covid where you might be under-resourced. You want to provide your visitors with the very best advice, recommendations, route information and trip ideas. FreeGuides is a great digital tool that you can use to ensure your visitors have a stay to remember. Through FreeGuides, councils/gov can curate digital walking tours to allow visitors to explore the local area in an easy, aesthetic and hassle-free manner on their phones. By doing so, a multitude of benefits and opportunities can arise for your area.
6 Reasons FreeGuides is perfect for Councils and governments
- One platform for all Replace maps and signs
- Marketing and awareness covered
- Highlight economic hotspots
- Virtual tourism centre
- Easy to use. Can be used by anyone, anytime.
- Additional revenue Paid Experiences and Pay what you want
1) One platform for all Replace maps and signs
Visitors are looking for a curated trip, one specifically made for them. With FreeGuides we allow you to replace our existing print media with a simple to use platform. Simply stick up some posters/flyers and allow us to take care of the rest. Our simple platform can be used to convert existing content including tours and maps into a simple-to-follow journey. Our technology understands each visitor based on their location, demographics and needs. Showing them the tours they will enjoy. Regardless of whether you are looking for an aboriginal tour or a bar crawl of the best whisky bars, FreeGuides curates everyone's recommendations for them.
Oberon Council Case Study
Oberon’s proximity to the world heritage listed Jenolan Caves and greater Blue Mountains national parks makes it the perfect place to visit; they recognise the importance of supporting the community and showing tribute to the history of the land.
Want:
Highlight the amazing sights and attractions whilst giving the small business an opportunity to stand out.
Need:
Collaborate with small businesses to increase economic growth and convert out-of-date maps and flyers into a scalable technology solution.
Here are some of the experiences of Oberon Council on our app:
Top 10 Things To Do In Oberon
You can also create self-guided tours highlighting cafes, restaurants, and other businesses in your area just as NSW Gov X Tech Central did:
Places to Eat and Drink Around Tech Central
2) Marketing and awareness covered
Every tourism agency struggles with marketing and raising awareness for the amazing opportunities in their area. FreeGuides is here to help we offer:
- Personalised support
- Physical marketing promoting your tours
- QR codes to be placed strategically to raise awareness
- Councils/gov profile to highlight all your tours
- Optional digital ads to drive additional traffic
- Access to 15,000+ users domestically and globally
See below for some marketing material we can provide to you:
3) Highlight economic hotspots
The main goal for councils/gov is to increase economic growth in the area, this can only be done by highlighting unique business. FreeGuides makes this easy, within your FreeGuides tour, you can add stops to nearby businesses such as local cafes and boutiques. Doing so provides extra foot traffic to those businesses as you guide your explorers there. This feature can be leveraged to benefit your councils/gov by forming a partnership/strong relationship with these businesses. Together you can arrange deals; for example they could provide your explorers with a discounted coffee.
When you create experiences on FreeGuides, we give you the option to include URLs at each tour stop. For example, if one of the stops you include in your tour is getting a drink at your best bar, you could insert a clickable link to pre-order a drink. This creates new opportunities for customers to transact with small businesses in your area.
4) Virtual tourism centre
Gone are the days of having to employ and train new tourism centre employees. Instead, you can direct your customers straight to the FreeGuides app, where guests will be equipped with a range of personalized tours digitally! Through FreeGuides, visitors can find and follow various walking tours, see local restaurants, and find recommendations for things to do in the area. These tours may be created by your team/locals or the FreeGuides team. Basically, we remove the hassle of having to coordinate all your visitors' travel plans... SCORE!
5) Easy to use. Can be used by anyone, anytime.
Many councils/gov have apps specifically made for them, this is a great solution for the first month. Then it goes downhill as the technology is designed for coders and developers, this means traffic goes down, negative reviews start to pile up and the marketing/curation team have to put in requests to keep the app up to date. Our technology is designed for marketing and volunteer teams to be able to update their tours at any time with no need for a coding degree. Teams can work together and can either make their tours on the mobile app or the web-app see below to show you how.
- Download our app: App Store / Google Play (Designed for explorers to find tours)
- Check out our Web-App (Designed for guides to make tours)
6) Additional revenue Paid Experiences and Pay what you want
Creating experiences with FreeGuides is also a great additional revenue stream for your councils/gov. We allow for two types of experiences ‘pay-what-you-want” (pwyw) and “Pre-Paid) our pwyw model allows explorers taking your tours to tip you however much they like at the end of the journey. For paid experiences, you set the price, as a council/gov you can encourage your own locals and business to create their own tours too leading to new tours and additional income for them.
Want to learn more check out our Government page
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