SHIROUBE, TRIP ADVISOR, WANDER / TRENDS IN THE TRAVEL INDUSTRY

Lugging around a dog-eared Lonely Planet paper guidebook as your explore a city is so 20th century. We've noticed how more and more brands and start-ups in the travel industry are thinking up new ways to engage with travellers and using technology to provide them with unique travel experiences.

Shiroube, a Japanese start-up hopes to provide highly personal and emotional journeys through cities, by creating an online marketplace for tourists in search of tour guides. The service claims to be to tour guides what AirBNB is to hotels. By allowing any individual to advertise as a guide on the site, Shiroube wants to create an alternative to the predictable jaunts through tourist trap that tour guides currently tend to offer and give travellers an authentic and unique trip. Prospective tour guides describe the tour and price on the site, and tourists can contact then contact them and pay using PayPal.

For the travellers who prefer a virtual tour guide rather than a flesh and blood one, online travel agent Trip Advisor has launched a series of 20 mobile city guides for Android phones.  Spanning a variety of popular destinations including New York, London, Hong Kong, Hawaii, and Orlando, the apps are smartly designed to be local to the handset, which avoids the costly roaming charges of having to connect to 3G or wi-fi. The apps include searchable maps that pinpoint bars, restaurants, sites of interest, self-guided tours and more, along with handy reviews by fellow travellers.

Thanks to new technologies you can even explore cities half-way across the world without ever crossing a border. Wander is an app that lets your virtually explore the world with your iPhone. After registering a personal profile or connecting through Facebook the app connects you with someone from another city who becomes your guide. For one week the two of you participate in 'daily photo missions' to help share your lives and surroundings, such as how you to got to work or school, or take a photo of a restaurant menu and share what you ordered.

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Shiroube is a great example of the holiday industry undergoing change as increasingly adventurous travellers use the web to seek out unique and authentic experiences. Like AirBnB, Shiroube decentralises and democratises the marketplace; it helps people to generate business on their own terms if they want to provide a service, while enabling service-finders to get a more personal experience.

Trip Advisor's travel experiences follow a more traditional model than Shiroube's, but offer a great opportunity for the brand. While the idea isn't entirely new, Trip Advisor is leveraging its trusted name, vast userbase and detailed data to extend itself into valuable branded utility.

The mobile city guides make Trip Advisor stand out from its competitors, driving loyalty among users and reminding them every time they engage with the brand through the app who they should use to book their next trip.

Wander is somewhat similar to Shiroube, except that the tour exists completely in the online world, however both services point at a desire for authenticity in travel and highlight the excitement of discovering a different part of the world with a real-life local, not a generic tourism-board approved guide. A travel brand could even adopt the Wander principles of discovery to engage with consumers using real people online.

These stories originally appeared on Contagious Feed. Contagious Feed is our bespoke trends, inspiration, insight and analysis service, providing daily innovative marketing intelligence across a comprehensive range of sectors to brands and agencies across the world. For more information about Contagious Feed contact:sales@contagiousmagazine.com