How did Pilsen city become the smart tourism champion?

Pilsen, the biggest city between Prague and Germany, aims to set smart city standards for the entire region. The city is an important tourist destination that attracted almost a million travelers in 2019. In 2022, Pilsen sets the benchmark for smart city tourism. Let’s see why.

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Pilsen: One region, one platform, one experience

The city of Pilsen and other local destinations and travel businesses in the region used an obsolete and inconsistent (but still widespread) approach to destination marketing. Each place provided visitors with all sorts of inconsistent guides. A live guide who does not speak your language here, a boring paper brochure there, or an outdated guide apps for tourists elsewhere.

Even though each subject in the travel industry in Pilsen wants something else out of a tour guide, they all find their needs covered by SmartGuide.

By now the entire city and all its major tourist attractions joined the SmartGuide platform and mutually benefited from each other’s impact, snowballing the visitors’ engagement and attracting all the more travelers.

The city’s DMO (Destination Management Organisations) published its official city guide on SmartGuide with freely accessible tours that showcase the highlights, but also nudge visitors to explore the surroundings that tourists would often miss. There are special tours for beer lovers, for families, and even a simple quest. This allows Pilsen to guide different types of visitors around places that are appealing to them specifically and prepare tailored experiences for different segments.

Attractions in Pilsen resolved visual pollution

When you take the tour for kids you may end up in the Pilsen ZOO. Visitors want to learn more about the animals they see, but the information boards can get quite big, especially in multiple languages. The boards block the view, distract visitors, and create visual pollution.

ZOO Pilsen was innovative and published interesting stories about the presented animals in SmartGuide. Now you can conveniently listen to the story while looking at the animal instead of staring at the board and enjoy the experience on another level. Also, parents can impress their children better…

The fewer information boards, the more space for animals - that is why people come to the ZOO in the first place. ZOO Pilsen made the guide publicly available to all visitors and gave them yet another good reason to come.

Pilsner Urquell Brewery increased tour capacity

The main tourist attraction in Pilsen (and the most popular private attraction in the Czech Republic) is the world-famous Pilsner Urquell brewery. The legendary beer brand used SmartGuide to digitize guided tours to the brewery, bottling plant, and museum. Visitors can explore the museum self-guided, just with the SmartGuide app on their phones.

SmartGuide also helps increase the tour capacity and turnover of visitors. Visitors need a live guide for safety reasons in the brewery and at the bottling plant - with SmartGuide delivering the tour in 6 languages, a visitor can join any tour departing every 15 minutes with a local guide and still get all the explanations in their language.

Visitors no longer need to queue long hours for a tour in their language and the brewery no longer needs to pay for foreign-speaking guides in subscale groups that make everyone else wait.

This content is not publicly visible in SmartGuide, but visitors who purchase a ticket can easily activate it by scanning a QR code on the ticket.

Pilsner tourism cluster built on SmartGuide

If you are visiting Pilsen, and you’re not into beer but prefer wine, SmartGuide has you covered with a tour of Bohemia Sekt, the most popular sparkling wine in the country.

The iconic St. Bartholomew’s Cathedral which dominates the historical center developed its own SmartGuide to tell curious stories about its interior. Visitors can purchase the guide for a small fee from the ticket office as an add-on to their ticket and activate it via a QR code.

And when you arrive by a RegioJet train or bus, the transportation company provides a premium city guide for their passengers as a gift for their booking.

SmartGuide interconnected all the important players of the local tourism ecosystem and enabled them to leverage the visitor potential of the entire region together.

Why should smart destinations follow the example of Pilsen?

Travelers absolutely love it. Instead of many different travel apps and paper leaflets, they enjoy their visit with engaging stories from a single intuitive app for all the places they interact with.

All SmartGuide partners have a bit different needs. Whether they are outdoor or indoor, non-profit public or profit-seeking private attractions, tour operators, or hotels, SmartGuide has the right solution for them to guide their visitors.

Each partner on the platform benefits from another. Visitors to the Pilsner ZOO learn about Pilsner Brewery and vice versa. And the DMO receives data analytics from all local guides to enable smart destination management that attracts even more visitors for everyone.

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