ETW Staff – Mumbai
The ministry of tourism has partnered with Genesys International to create a ‘Walking Tours’ platform, one of the first such initiatives to be undertaken in any country. ‘Walking Tours’ is a unique 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 Delhi 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 social media capabilities and facilitates creation of ‘local communities’ online.
A spokesperson for the ministry of tourism said that this new initiative aims to empower the tourist by facilitating him/her to plan to plan his/her tour. He stated that the ministry of tourism has set the target of having one ‘Walking Tour’ of each state within two years. The Indian tourism ministry was the first in the world to launch such a service.
Genesys International highlighted the features of the new service that would be available initially about the roads of five 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 are Hyderabad, Delhi, Mumbai, Coastal Goa and Ahmedabad.
As part of the website, users get full blown 360-degree views of destinations. 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.
