Spread the love

Travello, the Social network for travellers used in 180 countries, has partnered with Queensland Government to harness its community and technology to stimulate the recovery efforts in the tourism sector after a series of unprecedented events in the tourism industry.

The Australian Bushfires and The Coronavirus (COVID-19) have had a major impact on the tourism industry with numbers declining significantly in the wake of these major events.

That’s why the Palaszczuk Government is investing $300,000 into Brisbane start-up Travello to provide the tourism bodies like Tourism and Events Queensland, along with major industry players, with data and analytics to better market to visitors.

“The Queensland Government will partner with Travello to create Queensland’s data gold mine,” says Brett Kapernick, Queensland Tourism Industry Council Deputy Chief Executive.

“Data is crucial to ensuring we market the right experiences to the right people. This initiative will help change the way we market to visitors in destination.”

Travello is in a unique position to harness and activate their community to stay longer and spend more in a destination.

“Many people see Travello as just a social network, but we’ve built an incredible technology platform that sits behind Travello that allows us to send laser focussed marketing messages,” says Travello CEO and CoFounder Ryan Hanly.

This technology platform has been the basis of Travello’s partnership drive, but they are now partnering with State Governments and destination marketing organisations (DMOs) to assist with their ambitious targets in a globally competitive market.

Travello Head of Partnerships Josh Wicks explains “The vast majority of the Travello community are indestination, so that puts us in a unique position to incentivise spend on tours, activities, attractions and experiences as these are typically booked within 12-24 hrs of the doing the actual experience.

In some cases, we are actually seeing the booking window decreasing to minutes prior to doing the activity or attraction. So that makes it very hard to target those travellers, however Travello’s technology platform is now enabling this and driving additional spend from tourists in Queensland”.

The tourism industry is a major supplier of jobs and revenue for Australia with 1 in 12 jobs related to the tourism industry. The recent events have sent a shockwave through the industry, in response Tourism Australia and the State Tourism Organisations have launched a Holiday Here this Year Campaign to stimulate domestic travel.

Travello’s partnership with Queensland is set to compliment this strategy by promoting it’s 4,000+ Queensland experiences to travellers that are in the State and ready to buy.

QTIC Deputy CEO Brett Kapernick, “In service export sectors like tourism, the focus is on the customer more than ever before. If our tourism industry is to remain strong, it’s crucial that we embrace new technology in this sector.

Travello CEO Ryan Hanly said personalisation was key in travel, “Understanding the individual traveller, what they are interested in, and then curating an offer for that traveller is essentially the ‘holy grail’ of travel – but incredibly hard to do,” Mr Hanly said.

“We’ve developed a platform that utilises consumer data to truly understand the individual – and then present a curated offer to that traveller at exactly the right time.

“We can use this platform for destination management organisations, such as TEQ and QTIC, to promote new experiences and visitor dispersal. It means travellers will stay in the region longer, spend more, and also spread the economic benefits beyond signature regional experiences.”