Dave Mason Worthing & Adur Council I would be very grateful if you could reply to as many of these 7 questions as you can:
(1) Does your destination or service have an App or Apps?
(2) Does the local council/destination have an APP or Apps (if different to (1)
(3) How much did it/they cost to develop?
(4) How much does it/they cost to run per annum?
(5) Is it provided in-house or is there a 3rd party provider?
(6) If 3rd party provider, what is the provider’s name?
(7) If there are no Apps in place, are there plans to develop any and when?
Respond using the blog facility below or email or telephone Dave Mason Business Transformation Manager 07917 597 899 .
Any substantive conclusions will be reported to the membership in due course
British Destinations 
January 10, 2014 at 12:47 pm
Greater Yarmouth Tourist Authority launched an app last summer on both Apple and Android – we worked with a third party to develop the app as no other companies we could find did what we wanted to do in terms of developing a practical app rather than a pretty one that isn’t actually very useful, and of course one which doesn’t break the bank. It was also important to us that it didn’t cost the user lots of money in terms of downloads or huge use of battery life. We also worked with our local Town Centre Partnership as we agreed we’d rather have one app that does all the things we wanted it to do for the area rather than one app for tourism and another for shopping for example. The app we have produced uses GPS to locate the user in relation to things they might want to see / do / visit, covers a geographical area that we have set and can include as much or as little information as we want to provide – e.g. we’ve got info about toilets, car parks and cash machines so people can quickly find the nearest one. To save time we can export data from our DMS and import it into the app, and it also uses our events feed. The app is essentially the tourist information centre in the tourist’s pocket and is with them on the move throughout the borough. It updates using WiFi, but only when the tourist has a WiFi signal, the app doesn’t need WiFi or 3G etc to function as all the info, maps etc are embedded within the app, so if you’re in the back of beyond it still works. Feedback so far is positive and we are looking to develop it further and possibly also use it to create a festival specific app. The 3rd party provider is called Pocketi – check out http://www.pocketi.co.uk and the costs are on the website.
January 14, 2014 at 3:22 pm
The UK visitor guide apps is a low cost destination marketing app solution offered at additional discount to British Destination members. The bookshelf option is a very good and effective way of promoting the destination on apple platforms:
https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/official-uk-visitor-guides/id466730882
January 21, 2014 at 2:05 pm
There are some interesting insights on Apps and mobile optimisation of websites here http://www.visitengland.org/Images/Stefan%20Bardega_tcm30-39541.pdf (from VisitEngland’s Visitor Economy Conference in December). Also some comments on Twitter about apps that were posted during this presentation (go to about page 3 of the Storify site) – http://storify.com/gingerjuice/visitenglandvec13