Case Studies

VISIT CHESTER AND CHESHIRE

The Company

Visit Chester and Cheshire (VCC) was originally set up to market the region facilities and attractions to visitors. It was a co funded initiative between the Regional Development Agencies (RDAs) in this case North West Development Agency (NWDA) and VCC.

Background

NWDA and VCC developed an ecommerce www channel but wanted to develop other multi-channels such as mobile and kiosk. The Hub were able to provide both and made a proposal to set up several pilots in numerous strategic locations around the region.

The Solution  

The Hub had both an Unattended Payment Terminal (UPT) and mobile solution available to deploy with minimum set up charges. 5 key locations were identified representing the highest footfall on a typical visitor journey, including the Tourist Information Centre and Chester train station.

 The Hub took a web service feed from the incumbent www agency of visitchesterandcheshire.co.uk. In addition, The Hub provided access to additional content such as entertainment and transit ticketing, mobile top up as well as providing secure payment acceptance. The integration of these web service feeds resulted in 365 pages of local content and offers made available to visitors via touchscreen UPTs. Critically the Hub set up a location based vouchering system giving ‘visitors’ access to category based voucher offers. I.e. If navigation led the visitor to oriental meals then a restaurant was offered an exclusive to promote a discounted voucher.

 This solution was run under The Hub Networks model where it provided the UPTs and took a transactional cut from the payments made and advertising slots taken up.

The Results

The business model was predicated on a revenue split between transactions and advertising. The initial pilot aimed to reach breakeven after a year of being in market.

The live pilot programme lasted only 6 months due to the reorganisation of NWDA and indeed VCC. It was however successfully implemented but in only 2 of the originally proposed 5 locations. All web services were successfully ported onto The Hub platform and a handful of voucher discounts were negotiated with 10 local businesses in the restaurant category.

Browsing footfall was high and increasing. It was felt this reflected the need for in market information via ‘over the air’ devices either static or mobile. Having built up the evidence of ‘opportunities to see’ and rate card for advertisers the next step was to sell the available space.

Unfortunately RDAs were disbanded and the continuation of the pilot had to be curtailed without proving the breakeven model.

Conclusions

The Hub platform built APIs to receive Visit Britain web services. This enables us to access location based visitor information with relative ease and reduced set up costs in creating the plug in for other Visit Britain initiatives looking to increase in market information