Tourism on your phone: How Philly is leading and why it matters

With tourism, it’s all about where you are. Exactly where you are.

In Philadelphia, the past month has seen a wash of mobile geo-location tourism applications launch in and around the Cradle of Liberty. Trends say those deals and the mobile tools they employ today will help to profoundly reconfigure how tourists experience this greene country towne in the future.

City tourism officials announced last week with great fanfare a mobile app that puts users onto competitive ‘treks,’ sending them throughout the city to find and explore and earn points for what they find and how they find it. Philadelphia is the first city to use the platform, developed with SCVNGR, a now Boston-based company rooted at Princeton and Drexel universities.

In May, a deal was announced that partnered Commonwealth booster agency visitPA with geo-location social media powerhouse Foursquare, offering users digital badges for checking in at locations across the state in one of three categories: dining, buying and museum-going. Visit Bucks County has also launched a Foursquare deal, and the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corp. is starting to play there too.

Then in early June, the Fairmount Park Art Association unveiled its multi-platform Museum without Walls, in which visitors to the Ben Franklin Parkway can dial a phone number and choose to hear professionally-produced, rich oral histories of the art and sculptures that line that famed promenade.

All are giving users choice.

Read more at Philly Mag’s Philly Post.

Ten Philadelphia competitors and their January Web traffic

Click to enlarge.

Perhaps one of the most influential realities of the Web is metrics. The details of traffic and audience online have so rapidly become expansive that they have likely not yet been entirely harnessed.

Arguments still rage around the accuracy and importance of a myriad of Web analytics, but, away from page views, an increasing standard is to compare sites by their monthly unique visitors, though that number’s efficacy has no doubt come into question.

Until now, very little attention has been paid publicly to comparing Philadelphia’s many competitors by way of traffic comparison. With the first numbers for 2010 released this month by public Web analytics company Compete, Technically Philly decided to compile the first such digest.

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GPTMC, other urban destinations attract LGBT community online

Courting gay travelers is old hat for tourist agencies. What’s new is that now the courting is moving increasingly online.

In partnership with the the Greater Philadelphia Tourism and Marketing Corp., Southwest Airlines announced earlier this week that it launched Southwest.com/gayphilly, considered the first airline landing page for a gay destination, as first reported by the Inquirer. The GPTMC is giving away six free trips to Philly in a contest that, while featured in print advertisements, is almost otherwise entirely being promoted online, housed at gophila.com/gayphilly.

It may the first so Web-heavy advertising blitz directed at the gay community by the GPTMC, but it is certainly not the firsT — insert mildly euphemistic pun on the City of Brotherly Love.

In November 2003, GPTMC decided the city’s culture, history, nightlife and dining, packaged with the famed gayborhood could make Philly a top-tier destination for the LGBTQ community. So born was the popular “Get your History Straight and your Nightlife Gay” promotional campaign.

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