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tourism bc

Mapping Tourism Businesses on HelloBC

By William Bakker | 03.08.07 | 2 Comments

A few months ago, we launched our Kokanee release (the code names for our website releases are named after beer brands). The most significant improvement on the end user side is the inclusion of our new HelloBC Listing Program. This gives consumers the ability to find tourism products on our websites. Businesses can list their products through our TourismBC.net website.
The listing program offers a lot of flexible ways to provide information to consumers. It allows for the many different types of businesses to build in in a way that makes sense for the product they offer. The one thing I’d like to highlight here is the concept of how we use experience locations on our interactive maps.
Most tourism related websites offer maps just like the one below. The location of the business is highlighted. The user can zoom-in, zoom-out, move, etc. One thing we display I haven’t seen before is the location of the closest airport (as indicated by the tourism business). This is a requirement that comes straight out of our research. BC is a large place and the location of a tourism product related to the nearest airport is important.
map with product location and gateway airport
We have a lot of smart people at Tourism BC who have been working in the tourism industry, or working with tourism businesses for a long time. One of the things that was identified is that the location of a companies office is not necessarily where the experience takes place. To accommodate that, we created the concept of an experience location. Here are some examples of how tourism businesses are using this concept.
Below is an example of a cruise company. Besides the office location, it also shows the cruise destinations. Very useful for a consumer looking to cruise to a specific location, regardless of the port of departure.
Experience Locations for a Cruise Company
And here’s another great example. These are all the locations of a bus tour. Consumers can hop on at any of these locations. So the location of the office is irrelevant. This business chooses not to display it on the map.
Bus Stop Locations
By collecting this kind of geo-location information, we have the ability to do some very cool things in the future. We can plot the location of cruise destination from all companies on one map, for example. The creative juices are already flowing.


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