Off the Beaten Path
How a tour guide used VAMONDE to drive traffic and enhance her customers’ experience
In 2014, Leentje de Leeuw moved to Chicago and shortly after began Chica-Go tours in the spring of 2015. Before relocating to the Windy City, she had served as a journalist and tour guide in Belgium. She started Chica-Go Tours with one “off-the-beaten-path” walking tour and expanded to include several private and group tours that cover different parts of the city.
With these added excursions, Chica-Go tours quickly grew and currently serves many tourists from Belgium, the Netherlands, France, and Quebec in Canada. However, Leentje wanted to maintain her journalist roots and was seeking additional ways to tell the stories of the places on her tours to a broader audience.
Leentje met with VAMONDE, a digital experience platform that connects people with city stories. She was drawn to the storytelling aspect of the platform and the chance to share her explorations and tours in Chicago. The digital medium allowed her to share her tours with an existing community of travelers who are searching for local content. Like her own operation, she found VAMONDE to be nimble and forward thinking, which made the platform a good fit.
Chica-Go tours find a new look and a larger audience
Leentje launched her first experience (the off-the-beaten-path walking tour that explored the Belgian-inspired places around Chicago) by bringing together pictures taken on her tour with text and videos. As a journalist who previously thought only about words, she now had access to create with imagery, video, and audio to include multimedia such as videos and links to her website, ticket page, and booking calendar within her VAMONDE content. While this took getting used to, it allowed her to create experiences that engaged with a more digital audience. After working through these challenges, Leentje’s Off the Beaten Path with a Belgian Tour launched with enormous success.
Following the success of these tours, Leentje continued to publish other tours on the platform. Her Belgian Chocolate guide explores the confectionaries and bakeries that sell Belgian treats in Chicago. Frida & Friends wanders the streets of the historic and eclectic Pilsen neighborhood and stops at unique cafes and museums. She also published a tour on the best spots to grab a Belgian beer in her Get Your Belgian Beer Here guide. Leentje was active in sharing VAMONDE content on her personal Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter as well as the official account for Chica-Go Tours. Due to her commitment to sharing her content on social media, her tours, particularly her Belgian Chocolate tour, gained many views from the VAMONDE audience.
With great results, Leentje continues to think of new ideas while enhancing her existing content
With approximately 4,000 views of her content, VAMONDE has generated the level of growing engagement and traffic that Leentje was missing. By promoting her VAMONDE content, Leentje engages with a new digitally savvy audience (both tourists and locals) who are interested in hearing her perspective, thus growing her following in the process. With this new audience, Leentje has further integrated VAMONDE into her marketing efforts. She also has started using her VAMONDE content to augment her tour experience for customers by sharing exciting videos, additional pictures, and links to learn more about the stops on the tour. Sharing and building content on VAMONDE has allowed Leentje to connect with potential and existing customers in new and exciting ways.
The busy season for tours is quickly approaching, so Leentje plans to develop new ideas for tours while updating existing content with new videos and images as she develops them. Her goal is to use VAMONDE as part of her tour to help the tourists that she guides develop their own off-the-beaten-path adventure.
Learn more about the tools that Chica-Go Tours uses in their approach to expand their audience. Visit info.vamonde.com/ or contact kartik@vamonde.com to see if VAMONDE can work for your tours.
