Martinair– Mobile Travel Guide Talk In Your Language

By admin at November 29, 2007 | 11:07 pm | Print

What Company is Offering:
Martinair’s mobile travel guides combine several elements to create a helpful tool for their holiday-bound customers. The Dutch charter company is the first airline to offer its passengers a travel guide they can install on their web-enabled mobile phones.

How it Works:
Customers can buy a destination guide for EUR 6.50, and they’re free for anyone booking in December. A link is sent to the user’s phone by text message, and they can download the entire guide—approximately 400 KB—within minutes. Since all of the information is copied to their phone’s memory, travellers are able to avoid expensive roaming charges when they want to look up a local hotspot.

The travel guides are based on content provided by Leads2Travel’s travel editors and include local tips from Martinair crew members. Current destinations on offer are Curaçao, Miami and Havana, with two dozen other cities to follow over the next few months. While Dutch people won’t have much trouble getting by on the primarily Dutch speaking island of Curaçao, the guides for Miami and Havana offer an extra tool—a talking vocabulary. This service, built by Steape and accessible from within the travel guide, offers a host of useful phrases shown in Dutch and English or Spanish. Users who have trouble communicating with the locals can let their phones do the talking. Click on a button, and a friendly voice speaks the selected phrase.

On the mobile front, British travel business lastminute.com offers a Talking Translator—a free service that provides text and audio translations of holiday phrases from English into French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and German.

Still—we like Martinair’s integrated approach, bundling tailor-made travel information with a talking translator, and offering it to customers when they book their tickets. Other airlines to follow?
More at: www.martinair.com

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