Leading creator of digital experiences for museums, aquariums and zoos, Guru, has developed a custom mobile tour app for the 1200-acre Balboa Park in San Diego.
Balboa Park is home to 30 cultural institutions including museums, art galleries and theatres, as well as San Diego Zoo and a host of other attractions.
With so much for visitors to choose from, Balboa Park needed to give visitors a better way to navigate the park and find their way to events and exhibits that interested them.
Guru’s solution was to create ‘an app within an app’. The easy online tool does both jobs seamlessly, helping visitors orient themselves and discover what’s happening across the site’s many and varied offerings.
What’s more, the data collected gives the park a 360 view of their customers, helping to provide a better experience. Guru’s solution delivers real-time access to visitor behaviour, visitor paths, engagement metrics, and more.
The company worked on the project with Director and CEO of Balboa Park Online Collaborative, Nik Honeysett, who describes the app as ‘an emerging, essential business tool’:
“We’re actually able to make decisions on the data we’re generating out of the park,” says Honeysett.
Balboa Park visitors love Find my Car tool
With 17 car parks serving the site, a big hit has been the Find My Car feature. The app guides visitors straight back to their car at the end of their visit.
Balboa Park is celebrating its 150th anniversary this year. With remarkable foresight, the land was first set aside by San Diego civic leaders back in 1868. Commercial nurserywoman, Kate Sessions, planted thousands of trees and shrubs on the land from 1892 onwards, gradually transforming its character into the parkland that exists today. The site is home to a wide variety of the city’s cultural institutions including San Diego’s Museum of Art, Museum of Man and Natural History Museum.