Epic Llama is, from all my research, the first agency that intentionally designs a full travel experience in a gameful way. It is a company that finally does radical innovation in the travel field. The experience it offers plays with surprise, uncertainty and is highly focused on meeting like-minded people. How does it work? You have to select some availability dates from the website, request an invitation (the feeling of being exclusive) by filling in a questionnaire (diagnosing aspirations) and once a confirmation is received you will be part of a tribe (building familiarity). Once you ..read more

After I published the book Gamification in Tourism, I started analyzing and exploring designed immersive experiences all over the world. The goal was to find experiences that would leave me in awe and become embedded in my memory. For a very long time, I could only mention a single experience that fit into this category for me – The College of Wizardry. After searching for a very long time, I am extremely happy to announce that I can add another experience to this short list. It is The House of Eternal Return created by Meow Wolf located in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA. The House of Eternal Retur ..read more

Storytelling plays a big role in tourism. It is considered being one of the major reasons of why tourists are visiting attractions. How can you design immersive storytelling experiences that can strengthen attraction appeal?  The Legends of Arabia: Quest of the Pearl Tribes  is an example. After the water park’s operating hours,  the Gamification in Tourism team together with Dziobak Larp Studios and Yas Waterworld in Abu Dhabi helped create an immersive storytelling experience for the guests. In the following video, we will be sharing some tips and tricks of ..read more

The main economic offering in tourism is represented by experiences that have a promise of being memorable. In the Experience Economy, storytelling is one of the key memorable ingredients of an experience. There are already some existing innovative experiences that show the power of storytelling in action (e.g. Royal Museums in Greenwich, Kidzania, The College of Wizardry to name a few). Here, guests can live in a story first-hand and influence the outcome of the narrative by becoming a co-creator in the experience. Creating a story-based environment where it is easy to contribute to the overa ..read more

You might have a memorable experience to offer. But you might also have a problem. The noise on most communication channels might make people not notice it. And such was the case of The Dortmund Concert Hall in Germany. This was the case until people got an unusual call to adventure from cows that listened to classical music. The example comes from the advertising industry. It is a campaign developed by Jung V. Matt  and it is somewhat old (2010) but nevertheless still relevant. It is an excellent example that shows how products can become a memorable experience and at ..read more

Tourism is extremely accessible. More and more tourists have become very skilled at using search and metasearch engines to find the best price-quality ratio for tourism services. Businesses started to do cost-cutting and automation of their services in order to remain competitive. Cheap and fast access to destinations has triggered destinations and tourism businesses to compete in a global market that now has also competitors from the rapid growing sharing economy (Airbnb, Uber,Eatwith). Businesses and destinations that cannot differentiate themselves will be evaluated by tourists only on ..read more

The Quest TV Series is a great example of how to use film tourism in creating a transformational experience for the participants and also help promote a destination. The Quest was developed by a production team who had produced The Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Amazing Race and Queer Eye. The series are a new film genre that combines a staged immersive fantasy world with a reality show competition. In terms of better defining the experience I believe that it creates, films and broadcasts a competition with real participants that live action role play (larp) in a fictional unive ..read more

The Time Explorer Digital Missions of the Hampton Court Palace in London is a great example of how a museum can stage and help teachers co-create a memorable learning experience. The gamified experience links to England’s  national learning curriculum and it is targeted to pupils (aged 7-11) and their teachers. An extraordinary design feature about the Digital Missions is the way it covers all the stages of the experience (before-during-after). From all examples analysed on this blog so far, the Time Explorer experience is the best one that tries to holistically manage all ..read more

The example discussed here is the use of VR in a guerrilla marketing stunt made by Leavingstone, a Georgian advertising agency. Their experience goal was to promote the beer brand Old Irish in Georgia. Even tough it is an experience aimed to promote a product, I believe the tourism industry and experience designers can learn a lot from the execution. First, let’s have a look at the video. Giving people a call to adventure to explore a destination by using VR and then “teleporting” them in the actual environment can create a strong emotional bond with the destination. Such a tactic c ..read more

Between Lands  is an experience that shows a way of how virtual reality (VR) installations can be implemented in museums. The goal of the installation is to enhance companionship by asking a person that is in VR to communicate and cooperate with someone outside VR in order to complete a challenge. The two participants have to collaborate in order to illuminate physical sculptures in the installation place. What I like about this installation, besides linking a VR and non-VR person to collaborate towards a common goal, is that it manages to create a show for people that don’t partici ..read more