Tours4Mobile (T4M), the leading provider of self-guided tours that play on smartphones and tablets, is pleased to announce a new release, a mobile web app with benefits for their B2B partners as well as travelers who like to explore on their own schedule.
Travelers have been using self-guided tours to preview and navigate destinations throughout the US and in key international cities, primarily using Kindle and Nook’s popular eBook formats. Now, www.Tours4Mobile.com offers both consumers and businesses a broad array of features. The responsive site adapts to any size screen, and it has been streamlined to simplify the user experience while on-the-go. Meanwhile, affiliate-friendly features facilitate revenue-share partnerships with hotels, tourism organizations, travel agents, travel booking sites, and transportation companies, to name a few.
To celebrate this milestone, award-wining comedian and author of T4M’s New York tour, Geoff Woliner traveled to Montreal, rack cards in hand, to sign up hotel partners who will promote the T4M walking tour of the area. Understanding how to maximize the new affiliate features is crucial for mutual success. So instead of producing customized deal sheets and slide presentations, T4M now includes ‘$$$+News’, a place where news and marketing inspiration come together.
T4M’s founder Marie Profant explains: “First-time readers were surprised, because ‘$$$+News’ wasn’t a traditional news format, or a blog. But corporate executives need fast facts and creative marketing ideas, so we’ve adjusted the format. There’s an ‘ah-ha moment’ when they read the ‘$$$+News’ article ‘5 Tips for Hotels’ because they realize that the affiliate model can offer passive income, and that it can be implemented very easily at no cost. That’s when automation is at its best, and since the tours are a high-value amenity they’re sure to enhance their guests’ travel experience. For companies in such a competitive and low-margin industry, that’s a win-win.”
The new site still offers the same high-quality curated content: walking and driving tours by professional travel writers with maps, tons of pictures, historic facts and local legends, routes, directions, and valuable recommendations. Consumers select a destination, browse descriptions of the routes and guides, and then purchase and download the tours with a few clicks. Travelers say that “it’s like having a friend show you around.” That can be valuable to both business and leisure travelers who want to make the most of their time, and who want to explore on their own schedule. This month the Oktoberfest tour is featured, providing advice for those at the beer festival in Munich, as well as a virtual experience for armchair travelers. All tours are ready to download in QuietGuide format (PDF of commentary plus hundreds of images) and some of the tours are also in video format with narration describing the images.
About Tours4Mobile
Based in Santa Barbara, California, T4M is the largest source of professionally-produced, guided walking and driving tours created for cell phones and other mobile devices. Hundreds of tours are available, worldwide. The tours help travelers pre-plan their adventures, pick the best places to visit, and help people navigate the destinations. The editorial staff is led by Executive Editor and professional travel-writer, Gordon Burgett, who has published hundreds of travel articles and 35+ books. Gordon instructs all the tour providers in the best practices for tour guides as they use the new-media authoring system.
For B2B Partners
Affiliate programs are common throughout the Internet and offer monetization to businesses and individuals, specifically an additional way to profit from any promotion. They do this by adding a text note or banner, such as the one above, to their websites, blogs, newsletters, rack cards, etc. Affiliates generate traffic and sales for commercial websites and in return receive a commission payment. T4M offers higher than standard commissions to those who implement tips from $$$+News.
Driving the T4M developers was the conviction that “…in the long run the mobile web is going to dominate native apps” as quoted by Michael V. Copeland in an interview with Marc Andreessen for Wired.com. They integrated a theme-based web design with service plug-ins, cloud hosting, a shopping cart with coupons, membership module, blog, media player and more, following a trend toward technology “mashups.” This has resulted in a system that will scale with T4M’s world-wide growth opportunities.
Of interest to T4M’s investors is that the potential up-side is based on this new web app, a large inventory of high-quality content, and, although it’s been in a stealth mode until recently, the company’s proprietary publishing platform which allows user-generated content to be curated and automatically published in mobile-friendly formats.
