Odisha Tourism’s Digital Project Unravelling India

To the true traveller who seeks moments of serendipity at every corner, Odisha is a land of delight. Dotted with virgin beaches, enchanting wildlife and immersive art and architecture, this eastern coastal state truly deserves the moniker of “India’s best kept secret”. To showcase the diversity of experiences Odisha had to offer and position it as a global travel destination, the State crafted a marketing campaign powered by digital technology. Odisha Tourism’s Digital Project is a befitting example of digital experiences built around the traveller in search of the new and the unexplored.

The Need

Not long ago, travellers associated Odisha primarily with religious tourism where Jagannath Temple in Puri acted as the primary magnet for tourist influx. As a tourism brand, Odisha did not have a consistent, uniform positioning across platforms. Since awareness around the brand was limited both nationally and globally, the maximum tourist influx was from within Odisha and the neighbouring state of West Bengal.

In addition to this, the digital presence of Odisha Tourism lacked coherence. There were multiple websites supporting the entire tourism ecosystem which confused users. Also, the content on these websites was mostly static and not engaging enough to influence user purchase. This established the need for creating a singular end to end portal capable of handling all aspects of a traveller’s digital journey covering research, discovery, planning, purchase and loyalty. It was also important to bring the entire ecosystem of tourism service providers such as travel agents, tour operators, guides, hoteliers to effectively cater to the demand of the travellers.

The Solution

As the technology partners for the Department of Tourism, Govt. of Odisha, we understood the need and went to the drawing board to revamp the digital identity of Odisha Tourism. We carried out a detailed study on varied user persona and behaviour to map the User Interface and User Experience needs. Equipped with great work portfolio and domain specialists in the tourism industry, we recognized the need for using a powerful digital experience management system to power the Odisha Tourism digital project. Further to this, we skilled key personnel of this project in Adobe Digital Experience Platform stack to unlock maximum use cases in this domain.

AUTHOR:

Samparna Tripathy

Former, Division Head, Marketing Communications