The New Reality of Tourism
Globally, there are nearly five billion mobile phone users — a figure slated to grow by 200 million each year. The mobile phone is now a staple of everyday life, and even the least capable devices offer an impressive amount of power to the user. Leading tech giants, Google, Apple, Samsung, and many others, have all bet their immediate futures on the derivatives of augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR). Because of this, avenues and opportunities that did not exist before are now becoming available to industries of all kinds.
The Trinidad and Tobago tourism industry has achieved underwhelming success so far. In the face of considerable tourism assets, the country, its business sector and its governments have failed to maximize those assets’ value. Compared to islands like Jamaica, Barbados, and the Bahamas, our timid marketing efforts appear to be a major pitfall. Though plentiful, our attractions are not well known. We can fix this with VR, where we can capture the very experiences that we offer to visitors.
Imagine a person who is thinking about visiting the Louvre in Paris — any doubts about the worth of their visit could be minimized if they could experience a VR simulation of the Louvre. Australia, as they often have done in the digital tourism sector, lead the way with their VR exploits. Australia’s national website, Australia.com, allows its visitors to “Experience Australia in 360 degrees”, using the VR technology, Google Cardboard. Visitors get to see a virtual preview of the physical attractions that they would be able to explore were they to make Australia their vacation destination. Trinidad & Tobago can do the same. We can immerse potential visitors in previews of our attractions to pique their interests and turn their curiosity into high value conversions.
Another other issue that Trinidad & Tobago’s tourism industry faces is the experience of the visitors while they are visiting attractions. The information component of tourists’ experiences has traditionally been left up to de-facto, self-appointed, and self-interested “guides”, leaving no room for standardization or quality control. The mobilization of AR gives us the capability to move the information component of tourism to high-quality, centralized mobile platforms. Combining these platforms with other related, open platforms such as social networks widens the potential reach of these platforms. Lopinot Village is one of Trinidad’s lesser known attractions, featuring a plethora of buildings with a rich history. With AR, visitors could walk through Lopinot, point their phones at any building, and immediately receive the curated history of that building on their device. That is a streamlining possibility that simply cannot be ignored.
Concurrent with these technological developments, a select few countries have turned their focus to a subset, or alternate version of tourism, known only as Virtual Tourism. Virtual Tourism assumes that in the absence of a tourist’s physical presence in the country, that person can still be engaged as a tourist. Instead of using VR to offer potential visitors previews of the experiences that country can offer, these countries offer a full, high-quality and immersive virtual experience to the tourist. With this, barriers to tourism for people that cannot afford to travel, either for lack of money or time, are removed and access to new markets become available.
North America and Western Europe account for more than half a billion mobile users. With the most visual generations in history up for grabs, those two markets by themselves offer Trinidad & Tobago’s tourism industry an outstanding opportunity to make a giant leap forward in the way that it engages visitors.
