The Ministry of Tourism in India has partnered with Genesys International to create a ‘Walking Tours’ platform. ‘Walking Tours’ is a unique and exciting product that will enable users to navigate and route their way through cities based on a number of interesting themes.
The service was launched at a function in the New Delhi a few days back in which the representatives of the Ministry of Tourism and Genesys International were present. The website WoNoBo.com launched as part of this initiative is projected to be India’s first location-based service to offer ‘walkthroughs’ of streets across 54 Indian cities. The website supports user generated content (UGC), offers unique social media capabilities and facilitates creation of ‘local communities’ online.
Ministry of Tourism said that this new initiative aims to empower the tourist by facilitating him/her to plan to plan his/her tour. Ministry of Tourism has set the target of having one ‘Walking Tour’ of each State within 2 years. It is claimed that Indian Tourism Ministry is the first government tourism board in the world to launch such a service. Although many countries, mostly in Europe have walking tours in their tourist itinerary.
Genesys International highlighted the features of the new service that would be available initially about the roads of 5 major Indian cities and will soon be expanded to the top 54 cities within a few weeks. They stated that it would have mapped panoramic imagery of thousands of square kilometres and close to 10 million places of interest across the country. The five cities whose tours were launched were Hyderabad, Delhi, Mumbai, Coastal Goa and Ahmedabad.
As part of the website, users get full blown 360-degree views of destinations and much more. They can access, tag and review ‘points of interests’ i.e., locations, hotels, retail outlets, monuments, parks, etc and also view the interiors of several key locations, all powered by a database of millions of places.