Driving Innovation in Tourism

GoCar's distinctive approach allows users to embark on self-guided tours, navigating through cities in compact, three-wheeled, GPS-equipped vehicles, while listening to audio narratives about the surrounding landmarks and attractions.

We recently teamed up with GoCar to reimagine and rebuild the mobile app that runs their popular city tours, with the goal of enhancing scalability, incorporating new features, streamlining data management, and more.

Challenge

Prior to our engagement, GoCar faced several of critical challenges that required immediate attention and resolution. The foremost concern was the tours reliance on an aging and outdated legacy system, which was at significant risk of being shutdown -  a scenario that would not only disrupt tour operations nationwide, but also put the entire business in jeopardy.

Moreover, the legacy system being utilized had many limitations, including a lack of scalability and flexibility. This made it exceedingly difficult, if not impossible,  for the GoCar team to incorporate new features or cater to evolving customer demands - so keeping up with the dynamic market landscape and the expectations of its clientele had become a challenge.

In addition to the technical hurdles, the management of media content, including images and audio files, was a cumbersome task due to their scattered locations. This inefficiency not only hampered the workflow but also affected the overall customer experience.

Given the urgency of the situation, our primary goal was to swiftly transition GoCar to a new, robust system while laying a strong foundation that would pave the way for the implementation of GoCar's future vision in subsequent phases. The time sensitivity demanded a focused and efficient approach to ensure that the company's operations and reputation were safeguarded.

Solution:

In response to the critical challenges faced by GoCar, we crafted a comprehensive solution that aims to modernize their mobile app and infrastructure, enhance scalability, and improve user experience. The primary objective was to ensure a smooth transition to a new system, safeguarding their operations and reputation while paving the way for future growth.

Our team developed a cutting-edge in-car Android application that preserved the essential features from the previous app, while also providing a robust platform for future enhancements and scaling as GoCar continues to expand its services. The user-friendly interface allows tourists to easily navigate city tours while enjoying GPS-guided audio narratives about surrounding landmarks and attractions.

Because the system running GoCar’s tours was at risk of being shut down, our first order of business was gathering all of the crucial data being stored in the old system and securely migrating it to a new cloud-hosted database. This migration not only enhanced data security but also provided the flexibility and scalability required for future expansion.

To ensure a seamless tour experience, we implemented a shared Content Management System (CMS) tailored to GoCar's specific needs. The CMS provides an effortless way to manage, store, and utilize media files, including audio and images, which form the backbone of the tour experience. This efficient CMS ensures reliability and security, delivering audio files flawlessly to users and enriching the overall tour experience.

Once a member of GoCars team has selected a specific tour for a customer, the application is programmed to download and store all tour content from the CMS, helping to ensure a seamless, uninterrupted tour experience for customers, mitigating any risk of losing mobile connection.

To ensure that tourists are able to effortlessly follow their chosen route, while additionally enjoying engaging audio commentary based on exact GPS coordinates, we utilized Mapbox, a real-time mapping and location cloud platform.

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Outcome

The new go-car app has been a huge success, with tourists all over the country providing positive feedback on the new tour experience.

We are currently continuing our work with GoCar, and are in the midst of creating several new and exciting features - so be sure to stay tuned for updates!