Category: Innovation

Best Swiss App Award 2022

Hint

Intro

Our approach: Combining different technologies and different content providers to a simple and convenient digital product, which helps to simplify tasks for Grand Tour guests during planning of their journey and during on-stay.

Unified source of information

Planning you personal Grand Tour was very complicated before. The information of the Grand Tour have been heavily distributed across multiple sources from Switzerland Tourism (like MySwitzerland.com, different Microsites, Print Version of Grand Tour Touring Guide), but also from foreign sources. The app is solving that problem, by collecting the information from relevant sources (like the e-charging stations and their status), aggregating them and providing one source of truth to the Grand Tour guest.

Journey planning

To make it as easy as possible for users to plan their trips, a complex logic was implemented in the background that allows our guests to plan their trips individually. In this way, each individual travel day can be adapted to personal needs down to the last detail.

Day-by-Day planning

Trying to do a day-by-day planning of a journey for a specific amount of days previously became almost impossible, because the time for travelling on the road and the time for visiting a highlight wasn't available and needed to be calculated manually by the guests! With the help of a integrated navigation solution (MapBox) we can calculate the needed time between the highlights. When respecting the time needed for visiting a highlight, we then calculate how far you will come within one day, suggest the place of the overnight stay and let the guest know - based on the amount of days they want to spend on the Grand tour - at which destination their personal journey will end.

Content reused

To avoid an information gap between MySwitzerland.com (our main communication channel) and the app, already existing content was used for the app and no new content has been written! An API-driven approach allowed us to collect all structured information from MySwitzerland.com, by using the private and public endpoints of the Open Data API from MySwitzerland.io

The information is provided in Englisch, French, Italian, German, Dutch and Spanish. 

Point-to-point navigation

Classic navigation solutions don't provide the functionality to have turn-by-turn navigation, along a specific route with unlimited waypoints. By splitting the navigation parts into smaller pieces and with the help of the integrated navigation solution (MapBox), we are able to embed a point-to-point navigation. The navigation allows you also to avoid trafficjam and brings you back to the Grand Tour if you missed a junction. For the selected highlights, you will be automatically navigated to a parking lot. This is also a big improvement in comparison to the situation before: you don't have to care about where to park your car, the app already knows!

Collect Photo-Spots

Collecting the Photo-Spots is based on an Augmented Reality functionality. When you're nearby a Photo-Spot, you can collect the Photo-Spot by opening the camera, select the virtual Photo-Spot and add it to your wallet. The Photo-Spots then are added as Non-Fungible-Tokens (NFT) to a blockchain based platform. This makes the collected object immutable and unique and allows the transfer & sharing of collected objects in the future (not implemented yet). The collectable objects are part of the innovation program of Switzerland Tourism. The NFT's are the first important stept to avoid overtourism (putting collectable objects to hidden gems) and to increase the length of the stay of the guests.

Performant image delivery

Artificial intelligence is used to operate and deliver all images. In the back-end, editors only manage one image per teaser or page in each case. The final image that appears in the app is calculated and cropped while the app is being loaded to adjust to the screen size and the size of the component. The image is cropped fully automatically with the help of machine learning algorithms, whereby artificial intelligence ensures that the correct section of the image is selected and that the visual elements essential to the message are identified and retained. In addition, the image delivery service Cloudinary determines the image format and the image quality level (e.g. 75%) fully automatically and dynamically.

Grand Tour of Switzerland App download:

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