ivie - Enhancing the Independent Traveller Experience

How can you create a fulfilling experience for independent travellers?

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Shaping Vienna's ivie mobile app is a great example of creating a fulfilling experience for travellers who enjoy their own company. Available on iOS and Android devices, ivie is a large part of Shaping Vienna's 2025 Visitor Economy strategy.

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This strategy looks at certifying local operators to become more sustainable, improving satisfaction alongside revenue. With a new curation-led and editorial-driven website, the Vienna Tourism Board supports deeper discovery of the destination with this travel companion app; developing value tourism in parallel to demonstrating how Vienna can share, involve, pilot and pivot due to the pandemic.

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Find out more about how this strategy came to be here  

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The Logic and the Model

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ivie acts as a companion app to the city of Vienna, showcasing a catalogue of businesses, attractions, restaurants and shops chosen by the tourism board itself. Highlighting the best businesses, users can navigate Vienna completely independently.

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For the spontaneous or solo traveller, it saves time researching and shares local businesses efficiently, creating a comprehensive package for a variety of trip ideas. Using different formats like audio guides and video, users can explore the city completely independently, creating a richer experience.

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Users can plan ahead of their visit by saving favourites and checking what is nearby - useful for creating an itinerary and pin-pointing go-to places. These pages include fun facts about the area or some contextual history.

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Data can be collected with the permission of the traveller to track where current areas of interest are straight from the user itself.

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Value Tourism

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ivie offers two 'Walks & Guides' tours:

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Discover Vienna with me – lists of suggested spots worth visiting

Guided Tour – a packaged version of several walks that can be purchased separately

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These experiences can take users to hidden and unknown parts of the city they might not have discovered otherwise, creating a more immersive and valuable experience.

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City Cards further incentivise the in-person experience, two types with varying discounts and perks.

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The Experience Edition includes:

1. Access to unique Vienna experiences
2. Exclusive access and insights behind the scenes
3. Discounted experiences
4. 20% off on gastronomy experiences
5. 20% off on hotel rooms
6. Purely digital map
7. €25 per year
8. Personalisation

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With Vienna's Visitor Economy strategy in mind, this gives more value to local businesses and keeps the user at the centre of each decision.

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Find out more about ivie on the Shaping Vienna website

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Key takeaways

• If you can’t be there in person, build a digital companion for people in the city
• Create connection between discovery, inspiration and practical tips
• Use the app to understand where people are and where they are heading
• Think about different formats (audio, text, video) to enrich discovery