3.7.2012

The first in Finland

Turku's events and attractions can now be seen in a handy mobile version

Southwest Finland’s travel and tourism portal opened as a mobile version at m.turkutouring.fi on Friday, 29 June. Turku Touring's mobile service automatically detects the user's device and offers it optimised content.

Above: m.turkutouring.fi on an older iPhone.

Turku Touring published the www.turkutouring.fi portal based on open source code in 2011. Thanks to smart phones and tablet computers the number of mobile users has increased substantially, thus a mobile version of the popular travel and tourism website was a natural progression.

The service provides, in real-time, the same information as the turkutouring.fi  site, i.e. information about tourist destinations, events and things to do in Turku and Southwest Finland.

– To ensure a quality user experience we wanted to build the website for portable devices. We did not want to use a downloadable application, because it is impossible to predict which platform will be used by the majority of users in the future. For this reason we decided on HTML5 technology, which has been built with the needs of being able to run on low-powered devices such as smartphones and tablets and can present local information, says Teemu Vappula from Turku Touring.

Similar HTML5 mobile services are currently not available in the tourist sector in Finland.

– Turku Touring's mobile service presents the locations of events and attractions by using Google Maps. Users are also able to utilise the Kiss My Turku lists via the mobile service. Before making a trip to Turku a user can build their own itinerary and follow the route descriptions on the mobile map to the chosen locations, explains Tero Hämäläinen from Conmio.

The Finnish, Swedish and English service works on all modern smart phones as well as with most tablet computers. Further development of the tablet format has already been initiated. The development of mobile services that use maps will be in of major importance in the future.

– The tourist industry has acted as a pioneer in the adoption of many digital technologies. A high quality realisation and the provision of real added value for the user experience was Satumaa’s starting point for the design of TurkuTouring’s mobile website. We wondered what areas of the travel and tourism portal are those that a consumer could use with their mobile device, and how they could be successfully adapted for different devices, says Matias Mero from the advertising agency Satumaa.

The m.turkutouring.fi service was realised in collaboration with Turku Touring, Conmio, Mainostoimisto Satumaa and Sopranos Brainalliance.

For more information:

• m.turkutouring.fi
• www.turkutouring.fi