Attractions.io, a leading creator of mobile visitor apps, has partnered with Bosque de Chapultepec, a vast park in Mexico City that includes nine museums, a castle, and a zoo. Together, the organisations have developed a new app that helps guests explore the 866-hectare site.
At almost three times the size of Central Park, Bosque de Chapultepec is often best approached as a collection of attractions, with several visits needed to simply see the highlights.
Visitors at Bosque de Chapultepec can explore multiple atttractions across four different sectionsImage courtesy of Attractions.io
In a site this vast, wayfinding tools and staff can only do so much to point visitors toward their chosen attractions, let alone reveal the park's hidden corners.
As such, the park needed a unified digital experience that could orient visitors across all four of its sections in real time, even with limited phone signal.
This experience needed to help visitors plan their day based on their interests and available time, discover what's on (including exhibitions, events, and seasonal activities), and reach visitors directly with updates, reducing the reliance on physical signage.
The resulting app helps guests navigate the complex site with confidence, garnering 30,000 downloads per month and a 4.9-star rating on the App Store.
Data-backed decision-making
The team partnered with Attractions.io to create a brand-new mobile app that uses interactive maps and GPS wayfinding to help visitors move between sections and surface points of interest, facilities, and food options as they explore.
The new Bosque de Chapultepec app helps visitors to navigate the huge site
Image courtesy of Attractions.io
Aldair Contreras, digital manager, Bosque de Chapultepec, says: "We have hundreds of activities, but they're often not in a fixed location; they might be in the forest or out on the grass.
"Having accurate points of interest has helped our guests find activities more easily, as well as helping them discover new experiences they didn't know about when they arrived."
More than 150 unique activities are now discoverable and promoted through the app. These range from historic monuments to free activities such as yoga sessions or watercolour workshops, many of which had never appeared on a printed map.
Data from the app also informs which activities are recommended to visitors while on site. With these recommendations, guests can build a plan around their interests and the time they have available, which also reveals hidden attractions they might otherwise miss.
For example, following major investment, funfair attendance failed to grow as anticipated. The team found that the barrier to attendance was awareness rather than appeal, and is using the app to overcome this challenge.
"International guests didn't know we had a funfair, and locals didn't know it had reopened," says Natasha Uren Vázquez, executive director, Bosque de Chapultepec.
"Now we have the app, we're promoting it more, and attendance has been rising steadily."
Precise communications
In addition to enhancing the visitor experience, the app offers a live picture of how guests explore, and the data has become one of the park's core tools for deciding where to invest.
"The reports we get from our app management console have been so important in helping us plan and grow for the future," says Natasha Uren Vázquez, executive director, Bosque de Chapultepec.
"We now know that 60% of our guests spend most of their time at a single location and are looking into investing more to improve that specific space."
These findings helped support a funding application for the long-overdue refurbishment of the park's dining areas, with the app's user data providing evidence on how many visitors were using those spaces.
Guests can use the new Bosque de Chapultepec app to plan their visit around their own interests and availabilityImage courtesy of Attractions.io
Bosque de Chapultepec also plans to use the app for location-targeted advertising.
As a public body, the park has to be mindful of how often and when it reaches out to visitors. With the app, messages can be sent only to relevant visitors. This can alert nearby app users, for example, that a yoga class starts in ten minutes, rather than broadcasting to the entire audience.
This precision allows the park to directly promote free events and festivals to visitors, rather than relying on social and local media reach.
Recently, Attractions.io helped drive food and beverage revenue by introducing mobile food ordering at Chester Zoo, the UK's most-visited wildlife attraction.
