5 New Travel Startups Making Iconic Attractions More Appealing

Destinations aren’t anything special without attractions, be it farmers markets, theme parks, or famed art museums. If travelers can have connected experiences at hotels and on airlines, for example, then attractions are next in line to get plugged into travelers’ devices.

Whether it’s making sure attractions are easy to book online or engaging to learn about before, during, and after a visit, many attractions haven’t maximized their digital footprints to keep themselves fresh in travelers’ minds. Attractions are generally one of the key drivers for visits to top destinations and that’s why this week we look at five startups interested in taking attractions to the next level — making travelers excited to visit them and even more eager to interact with them in the future.

Attractions.io is a software-as-a-service platform that helps attractions build mobile apps for visitors.

>>SkiftTake: Travelers don’t need a mobile app for everything but do appreciate information readily available on their phone about a place they’re visiting.

Attraction Suite helps attractions improve their online booking experience.

>>SkiftTake: Attractions have a lot to learn from travelers’ online booking behavior, but with an increasingly competitive landscape for booking visits online, it gets more difficult to understand the full picture.

QuestUpon offers guided augmented and virtual reality tours of destinations.

>>SkiftTake: If this summer’s global Pokemon Go craze taught us anything, it’s that we’ve barely scratched the surface of the massive opportunities that augmented and virtual reality hold for driving visitor growth.

In-flight VR creates virtual reality content for airlines’ in-flight entertainment systems.

>>SkiftTake: It’s still unclear if virtual reality will fit in with the close quarters of an aircraft cabin given the space that some virtual reality experiences require. It’s still an imaginative concept that plenty of airlines are surely clamoring to test out. And airline passengers are captive audiences that may enjoy getting a preview of some attractions they’ll soon visit.

Prisme projects laser and light shows onto historical sites and attractions around the world to breathe new life into these places and tell new digital stories to reinvent these sites for modern travelers.

>>SkiftTake: The work with the Pyramids of Giza that Prisme has done illustrates one possibility to bring new life to these monuments that have existed for thousands of years and may be losing their luster.

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