The best disruptive strategies for tourist information centres
Disruptive innovation is a concept that is closely related to business creation. With competition and globalisation intensifying, the lines between markets are starting to blur, and companies are finding it increasingly more challenging to set themselves apart.
This is driving a trend where the incremental value of startup projects is having less and less of an impact on the marketplace. Simply coming up with a new concept is no longer enough. As information multiplies, so too the value proposition for customers.
To stand out from the crowd, tourist information centres have to follow the same path as companies that opt for a disruptive strategy.
Revolutionising the market turns modern companies into leaders that have an impact on all levels: consumer behaviour, tastes and interests, government policy and market trends.
What are disruptive strategies?
A disruptive strategy is one that drives product or service development to create a new market while disrupting existing competitors that were previously dominating that same market.
Often, the strategy that companies use is to offer products or services that are simpler and cheaper than existing ones, or ones that can serve customers that were previously inaccessible to the market. A disruptive strategy approach is different than a traditional or incremental strategy.
Traditional strategies work for companies when there are current opportunities in the current market. Incremental strategies are used when companies have a new business opportunity in an existing market or current opportunities in a new market.
On the other hand, the situation is more challenging when new opportunities arise in new markets. This is why we recommend leveraging the power of disruptive strategies.
Disruptive approaches in tourist information centres
The rise of the internet drastically changed the travel industry thanks to its ability to connect buyers and sellers directly and easily automate processes.
These disruptive changes largely mean that the roles that traditional tourist information centres played have become less important as they’ve been replaced by new companies and business models,
even though it’s true that there are still many opportunities to be explored and restructured in every link of the value chain at tourist information centres. A prime example of this is destination promotion using digital tourism devices like totems, kiosks and interactive showcases.
Instinctively, the vast majority of travel destination promotion efforts seem to be focused on those channels that are becoming less relevant in terms of prescribing users’ trips, whether it be catalogues, paper brochures, placements in professional magazines and TV adverts.
We live in the digital age of sharing on social media, but how can you encourage tourists to recommend a visit to your city to their friends and followers? The answer is clear: by adding value and creating a unique experience through digital devices.
Tourism innovation means completely reformulating the value chain process and focusing it on the user experience, aligning it as much as possible with the destination’s ultimate goal which, when it comes to tourist information centres , is to increase the number of visitors.
Disruptive strategies for tourist information centres:
1. Create fresh demand:
Tourist centres are no longer focusing only on their own offerings, but are beginning to incorporate products and services from other businesses to enrich the visitor experience and boost sales.
This means reinventing markets by creating new demands for your services as a way to carve out a new niche in the market. It’s about pushing your limits and becoming the popular choice in a very traditional market.
2. From physical to digital:
Tourist information centres need to find points of connection between the physical and online world to better engage with visitors so that they continue to purchase travel products even when they’re at the destination.
Tourism companies will have to transform their IT architectures to become more agile and simpler.
A new era of cooperative ecosystems is dawning, where different partners will work together to deliver their products and services, creating new experiences.
This requires the support of a digital infrastructure that can deal with these interactions over time.
3. Create a behaviour change to boost demand:
Mobile apps make it possible to change people’s behaviour or the way in which they get organised to do certain things. Today, things that once had to be done manually can be done in real time by connecting with people nearby.
As technology advances, so do channels, formats and tourist destinations. This opens up a wide range of opportunities for tourist information centres in terms of content.
There are several amazing channels and ways to “hook” the thousands of users that are out there.
On top of that, new options and consumer demands are popping up all the time. It’s time to rethink the value proposition that both tourist information centres and tourist destinations offer.
These are some of the main disruptive strategies for tourist information centres. At iUrban, we help tourist information centres implement their strategies by offering an innovative approach to the development of digital devices.
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