E-guardians to lead travellers through God’s Own Country
Thiruvananthapuram, July 08: Tech-savvy Kerala Tourism, a pioneer in using information technology with innovative products, will launch a fresh set of mobile-based services and IT-based projects to make the passage to God’s Own Country a hassle-free and more pleasant experience.
The new products like mobile website, WAP guide, applications and Bluetooth Kiosks will be unveiled at a function here on July 10, by Hon’ble Minister for Tourism and Welfare of Schedules Castes and Backward Classes Shri A P Anil Kumar.
“The world is making a transition from web-based tools to smartphone-based tools. Kerala Tourism is hence making another ground-breaking move with this new array of mobile products to seize the growing opportunity and stay put a notch above our competitors,” Shri Anil Kumar said ahead of the launch.
“For the tourists travelling to Kerala, these products will prove to be their e-guardians rather with a comprehensive supportive and protective than cover rather than being just e-guides,” said Minister.
“The visitors who are connected with their smartphones and mobile apps will be able to explore the destinations in the State without external support, but by using these unique products which will provide a wide range of features like tour planning, updates, guidance, destination details,” said Kerala Tourism Secretary Shri B Suman.
“Besides these tools, the Tourism Department is setting up Bluetooth kiosks matching with international standards at key places like international airports within the state to help the tourists coming to the State,” informed Tourism Director Smt Rani George.
There were 5.9 billion mobile subscribers across the globe in the year 2011. Latest data shows that smartphones constituted 31.8% of the total shipment of mobile phones during the previous year.
This is the latest offer from the state of Kerala Tourism that has won the national Tourism Award for its website (www.keralatourism.org) five times in the last decade, recognising its innovations.
The Kerala Tourism website started with just 50 visitors a day in 1998 and today it gets 7000-8000 visit per day and more than 2.5 million visits a year. In addition, Kerala tourism is active in social media like You Tube with 3 million video views a year, 1.76 lakhs fans on Facebook and 9500 followers in Twitter. Kerala Tourism started exploring mobile technology as early as in 2006.
The IT initiatives for travellers and industry, social media campaigns like micro-blogging, social networking, travel social networks, photo sharing, brand video channel on Youtube, Facebook fan page, web-based campaigns etc have given edge to Kerala to win the award.
Several international search engines have ranked www.keralatourism.org as the first site for information on Kerala since 2003. The monthly e-newsletter of Kerala Tourism goes out to around 85,000 subscribers worldwide.