TourComm launches new information portal for brown signs

After a planning process lasting several months, the further development and internationalisation of the Experience Guide is making visible progress. The first step has now been the relaunch of the WebApp. This can now be accessed under its own URL braune-schilder.info. A filterable POI list for Germany and Austria has been transformed into a comprehensive information portal for Europe with numerous regional and category filters, as well as an interactive overview map. Three more countries have been added with the relaunch.

What's new in the WebApp?

• New design and logo
  The ‘brown signs’ are not just a big issue during the summer holiday season. Every year, several hundred press articles are published on the subject. In order to benefit from this trend in the long term and to be recognised as a high-quality source of information, the WebApp will no longer focus on the TourComm product ‘Experience Guide’, but on information about the brown signs in Europe. This change is part of our long-term internationalisation strategy and is expressed by a new logo and the brown colour scheme of the tourist signage.
• New technology
  A key aim of the relaunch was to equip the WebApp with additional functions and create an interactive map overview. In order to utilise existing synergies and at the same time create a future-proof development, the in-house MAQNIFY© CMS was expanded and the Erlebnisguide WebApp was moved here. This will save resources in future development and offers many new technical possibilities. One important aspect is the improved recording of usage statistics. The MAQNIFY© CMS will provide more detailed analysis options in future.
• New functions and filters
  The biggest new feature of the WebApp is the introduction of an overview map. It is now even easier to categorise geographically where the respective POI can be found on the brown signs. For this purpose, a new region level has been added, which allows destinations to be filtered by country, federal state and tourist region. In addition, the categories have been grouped thematically and given a unique symbol, which can be found in the pins on the map and in the category clusters below the map.
• New content
  To mark the launch of the new WebApp, we are pleased to announce the launch of three new countries. Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg are now ready to be discovered with multilingual content. Since the beginning of the year, the existing geodata has been turned into complete and multilingual data sets with contact information, descriptive texts and the familiar audio content. This strengthens our unique selling point far beyond Germany and makes it even easier for external partners to use the data for their own applications.

Future plans

Where are we heading with braune-schilder.info and the experience guide?

Our aim is to become the leading information portal on brown signs in Europe and to further develop this unique selling point. The relaunch of the WebApp was the first publicly visible step in this development.

In technical terms, the WebApp will soon be introducing the familiar free text search function to make it even easier to find specific POIs. POIs will also receive additional tags as meta information to enable deeper filtering within a category. In the next step, the experience guide app for Android and iOS will also be fundamentally revised.

In terms of content, the focus is on internationalisation. In addition to the introduction of further languages, this primarily involves opening up further European countries. To this end, a roadmap for the next 18 months has been adopted, which will bring us ever closer to our goals.