The platform can deliver premium, in-depth, up-to-date and highly personalised guides for any destination on earth.
The advance is all down to Obvlo’s development of its own AI tools, which over the past 12 months have helped it to reduce the time it takes to produce exceptional dynamic content from two weeks to just an hour.
It represents a huge step change for the industry, and not just because of the speeds being achieved. Obvlo is the first platform to make local guides personalised, at a time when personalisation is proving to be one of the main drivers of a revolution in the guest journey and guest experience across search, upsells, booking engines and in-stay communication. This is resulting in higher revenues and increased loyalty.
Obvlo’s innovation is a game changer for larger hotel chains that struggle to produce useful, visually-appealing and accurate guides that look bespoke for each location without inadvertently publishing out-of-date and inappropriate information. Even the old static guides — out of date the moment they were finished — took hotels months to complete manually.
It has also removed the cost barrier for smaller, boutique, independent or pop-up hotels who have struggled historically with the upfront and ongoing cost associated with providing guests with guides of sufficient quality.
Unlike traditional static guidebooks, Obvlo’s content, which can also be used to populate and integrate with third-party guides, is continuously refreshed. This guarantees that guests always receive the most relevant and accurate information available.
Powered by advanced AI technology, the platform automatically scours the web for any location worldwide using predefined criteria, aggregating and analysing data in articles, blogs and reviews. It even scores and ranks images based on technical and aesthetic quality to ensure that only the best are displayed, streamlining a process that previously required significant time to manually sift through and identify the top selections. Each recommendation is ranked and scored based on the authority of the source and the quality of reviews, guaranteeing that only the best local experiences are featured. This information is compared with guests’ individual interests and preferences, including who they are with and the purpose of their trip.
Tailored to over 100 distinct guest archetypes, Obvlo’s dynamic content also considers crucial factors like weather, time of day and personal preferences to provide the most relevant suggestions. It also promotes local independent businesses, because it doesn’t rely on information from review websites where the businesses featured have simply paid to be included or rank more highly, ensuring guests receive an authentic experience that supports local communities.
Obvlo’s guides also serve as a powerful revenue-generating tool for hotels. Leveraging the data generated in these guides, hoteliers can create detailed audience segments and guest personas, enabling highly targeted remarketing and personalised in-house offers. Obvlo’s guides also seamlessly integrate with Google Analytics, giving hoteliers insights into what guests are interested in, making it easier to remarket and upsell.
Hotels can integrate Obvlo’s dynamic content directly into their apps to deliver rich, immersive local content, or leverage Obvlo’s hosted platform if they don’t use a third-party guide.
Callum McPherson, CEO & Founder of Obvlo, said: “As we continue to push the boundaries of what’s possible in travel technology, our goal has always been to enrich the guest experience by offering truly local and personalised content that is never out of date. Now that we’ve brought the time required to do that down to one hour, there isn’t a hotel on earth that can’t afford to offer guests a guide that really improves their stay.
“What sets us apart is not just our ability to deliver fresh content but our commitment to maintaining the highest quality of information. The issue with static guidebooks is that they quickly become outdated as opening hours change, links break, venues close and are replaced by something else. Our AI-driven platform addresses this challenge head on. Each day, our system updates approximately 5-10% of our dynamic content, rooting out outdated information.”
