Tourism Influencer
The tourism industry is a primary economic engine for many Latin American countries since most citizens living around tourist destinations live from or work in this sector. In particular, Mexico is one of the countries with the greatest losses in this industry during the COVID-19 pandemic, with thousands of workers let go from their positions and no glimpse of recovery.
This is why Tourism Influencer, an app that transforms local communities into unique tourism opportunities, can help the unemployed during economic downturns. It is a three step process: 1) train users to become social media content creators, or influencers, and promote their communities as tour ambassadors, 2) allow other unemployed community members and local businesses to work with the influencers to showcase the regional specialties, and 3) channel both international and domestic travellers to experience the intrinsic values of these hidden communities.
Countries in Latin America and the Caribbean are betting on tourism. In addition to enhancing economic growth and helping to reduce poverty, tourism has been shown to promote social inclusion and incentivize natural and cultural resource conservation.
Mexico is fifth in employment in the tourism industry. In Q4 of 2019, INEGI published that the tourism industry represented 8.9% of Mexican employment. This sector is one of the main job sources for many communities in Mexico since most people living around tourist destinations work in that industry.
According to UNWTO, international tourism has been impacted strongly by COVID-19 since its outbreak. Latin America is losing millions of travellers. Mexico is the largest tourism destination in Latin America, number seven worldwide, and is one of the countries with the greatest unemployment rate. Airlines have reduced their flights, cruise lines have suspended operations and hotels are closed. The result is causing massive job losses in the country, and people in communities that live from tourism will not find it easy to regain employment.
Tourism Influencer is an app that will promote the local tourism and is divided in three areas:
The first one consists of a chatbot and e-learning app that will train users to become online content creators, tour guides, and tourism advisors to transform their local environments as unique tourist destinations and profit from them. The chatbot is the concierge that helps users identify training videos that best fits them. The concierge will give users the options to be trained as content creators, tour guides or travel advisors. After that, the app will train them through video tutorials. There will be a wide range of tutorials.
The users, who will become influencers, will earn a living by sharing their day-to-day activities and insights of their communities culturally and physically on social media platforms, and sell specialty products originating in their communities online.
The second is marketing for touristic companies, where they can advertise their businesses on the app.
The third one will be the access of tourists looking for information about their potential destinations. The app will provide them information about the destination and they will be able to contact the influencers and touristic companies that belong to tourism influencers.
We are targeting workers who have lost their jobs due to economic crises, such as the current COVID-19 pandemic, and are familiar with their own communities and cultures. Our solution focuses on training the unemployed workers to become entrepreneurs and creating value with their personal knowledge of their communities.
Tourism Influencer will provide them the tools needed to promote tourism for their communities, by training them to become tourist guides, travel advisors or worldwide influencers of their communities and showing them how to make money out of creating content for the rest of the world.
Users will learn how to use the tools that they have near them by taking advantage of their general knowledge and their knowledge of their communities and use it as a way to make money.
- Enable small and new businesses, especially in untapped communities, to prosper and create good jobs through access to capital, networks, and technology
Our solution focuses on bringing out the individual characteristics of any communities, rural or urban, and transforming them into economic value in the form of tourist destinations. The solution relies on the intricate knowledge of the communities from their members and their creativity in creating contents to promote the communities online. Although anyone can participate as influencers, our mission is to help the unemployed workers recover from economic crises.
- Prototype: A venture or organization building and testing its product, service, or business model
- A new business model or process
Our proposed solution is innovative because:
It transforms untapped communities into tourist destinations by turning their definitive characteristics into unique tourism attractions;
It uses the combined knowledge of the community members to create value for their communities;
It provides a rapid way for people who are unemployed to earn a living by using their knowledge of their communities;
It supports tourism in communities and natural areas without degradation because the tourists are remote from these sites;
It offers 24/7 training to people to use existing social media platforms to earn a living;
It enables people to access a tourism audience anywhere in the world and earn an income online;
It offers a platform that allows learning from the web and any mobile device;
It allows users to earn money by sharing content about their lifestyle and the cultural and natural wealth of their communities, raising awareness of the importance of sustainable development and also having the opportunity to connect with millions of travel, food and environment lovers; and
The platform will optimize for content most liked by users and courses most valued by communities using the data it generates.
- Crowdsourced Service / Social Networks
- Software and Mobile Applications
- Women & Girls
- LGBTQ+
- Rural
- Peri-Urban
- Urban
- Poor
- Low-Income
- Middle-Income
- Refugees & Internally Displaced Persons
- Minorities & Previously Excluded Populations
- Persons with Disabilities
- 1. No Poverty
- 8. Decent Work and Economic Growth
- 10. Reduced Inequalities
- 11. Sustainable Cities and Communities
- 13. Climate Action
- 15. Life on Land
- Canada
- Mexico
- Mexico
- For-profit, including B-Corp or similar models
The solution team consists of three full-time members, three part-time consultants and a software development team in Mexico with over twenty developers.
We are a multi-disciplinary and international team of Canadians and Mexicans with experiences and knowledge in tourism, software development, emerging technologies and innovation methodologies. Some of our team members have worked in some of the most popular tourist destinations of Mexico for over 10 years, and have experienced the local problems that are exhibited there first hand. We believe our combined strengths and insights position us well in understanding and addressing the key problems connected to this challenge.
At this stage, we have not partnered with any organizations yet. However, moving forward, we would like to reach out to a number of key organizations in Mexico that are listed in the Partnership Potential section.
We will initially establish as a non-profit organization and work with the Mexican Government and NGO agencies to reach out to the target market of unemployed workers and untapped communities in Mexico. Once we gained a user base of influencers, we will move to a membership fee model with the successful influencers as customers. We will continue to explore and refine the business model with the funding from this challenge.
- Individual consumers or stakeholders (B2C)
National System for Integral Family Development (DIF) - We would like DIF to become one of our marketing channels since it has access to a large number of untapped communities.
Quintanarroense Institute of Innovation and Technology - Providing the resources, especially internet access for communities, to run the pilot program.