Travel Manitoba envisioned an interactive technology that could immerse you in Manitoba’s tourism experiences in their new state of the art Visitor Travel Centre.
Challenge
Solution
Tactica Interactive and Travel Manitoba collaborated to create a state of the art interactive touchscreen wall for their Visitor Information Centre at The Forks in Winnipeg. The Interactive Feature Wall takes visitors on a digital journey across Manitoba, providing the tools and inspiration for travellers to make their trip a reality.
Our solution is designed to inspire and inform visitors by dynamically adapting to their approach to discovering Manitoba’s attractions, nature, history and culture through a compelling and immersive interactive experience. A fully responsive mobile and desktop website is also accessible allowing users from around the world to take part.
The interactive travel planner
The heart of the interactive installation is the Travel Planner, an intuitive and impactful tool that helps visitors plan their perfect trip. The Travel Planner allows visitors to:
- self-identify and uncover their perfect attractions based on lifestyle, season and interests;
- search and explore based on their specific interests and needs, or be inspired and discover travel ideas based on collective social recommendations and compelling imagery;
- add items to their travel plan or choose from and customize preset itineraries; and
- take away and share their travel plans through their mobile device, social media or print copies.
Expert and self guided tour
The experience begins with a simple choice:
- take a guided tour and let a virtual travel guide help you create a trip personalized for you, or
- browse and discover activities and locations that excite you the most.
The guided tour asks you a series of questions including “How do you want to feel when you leave?”, “How do you prefer to explore?”, and “What season do you prefer?” Each response builds helps an algorithm find activities and locations that match your preferences. The result is a short list of potential experiences, culled from hundreds of options, that best matches you.
Attraction “heart” wall
The wall features beautiful image tiles to showcase Manitoba attractions and allows users to “upvote” the attractions they like by tapping on a heart icon. An algorithm places popular attractions in more prominent places and will increase the size of the imagery to reflect its popularity. Less popular items will also be rotated in as part of the algorithm to ensure exposure to more niche attractions.
Users will also be able to dive deeper into an attraction to find out more and add to their travel plan. Each attraction’s detail screen features a description of the attraction, video, an image slideshow, a map view, and related attractions. When accessed from a mobile device or browser, the user will also be able to share the attraction out to social media.
Interactive Map
The interactive map provides users with a familiar way to locate attractions in Manitoba, and explore interesting things that can be found nearby. To help the user find relevant services and activities, attractions are displayed as a labeled markers with intuitive icons on the map.
Social media integration
To help users share attraction content with their friends and family the experience features Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram integration. Users can share everything from specific attractions to their full travel itinerary.
Result
The project was delivered at a high quality, on time and on budget to the great satisfaction of our client Travel Manitoba. They publicly launched the interactive touchscreen trip planner during a press conference introducing the media to their new travel centre.
Client Profile
Travel Manitoba
Travel Manitoba is the only public/private non-profit tourism marketing organization that provides a province-wide platform to promote Manitoba as a premier travel destination. Travel Manitoba is a Crown corporation whose role is to provide leadership by collaborating with tourism businesses, communities, destination marketing organizations and governments to realize the full potential for tourism in Manitoba.