PORTLAND — NaviTour has released its first version of a local tour guide, travel concierge, and experience booking platform to help visitors and locals navigate Maine’s diverse landscape. This comes when Maine’s tourism is at an all-time high, with visitors flocking to the state looking for connections and unique things to do.
“We have built an online tour and experience platform that is unique in the tourism industry. This is because we directly focus on rural communities and individual guides. We are so much more than a marketing or booking service we are a platform built for guides so they can focus on connecting to visitors and make a difference in how they experience the destination,” says Shay Bellas, CEO of NaviTour. “With diversity and inclusion at our core, we empower all creating experiences to build their own brand, own their content, and expand their businesses. NaviTour is putting decades of tourism, business development, and marketing expertise to work for small independent guides and other experience providers. We currently have 60 guides and experience providers on our platform, and we will continue to evolve, adding more weekly. By providing these local experts with this much-needed platform and utilizing their expertise to continue to build it, we should be able to scale the company quickly. We plan to provide experiences throughout New England within the next 12 months and nationally within a few years.”
“NaviTour’s focus on rural communities will help boost tourism in some of the less known parts of the state, and help spread the love from the congested ‘tourist traps’ to make visiting Maine a better experience for all,” says Pam Hurley-Moser, EVP of Strategic Partnerships. “By providing the opportunity for independent experience providers to shift from being the best-kept secrets to being accessible to travelers across the globe will help increase the number of visitors to those regions and hopefully expand the tourism season.”
“NaviTour brings many components into one platform,” says Jacob Pelkey, tourism developer at the Northern Maine Development Commission in Presque Isle. “NaviTour’s focused vision for offerings helps the visitor navigate rural destinations by highlighting and bringing options directly to the visitor’s fingertips. Unfortunately, authentic tours and experiences are getting swallowed up by the destination marketing of lodging, commercial cruises, and tourist traps. The visitor only has a small glimpse of all the great offerings in our region, as not all businesses choose or can afford to advertise in publications. In addition, if they don’t use the newest tools and update their marketing regularly, they quickly become obsolete, untrustworthy, or too much of a hassle for the customer to complete the sale.”
Several NaviTour Experiences are available to book now at www.navitour.com, and they welcome all experience providers to apply for a FREE profile and listings.
What Guides are saying:
Scott Stone, Independent Tour Guide in Western Maine – “This is exactly what we need, this is something that is really going to help folks around here”.
Nicole Mokeme, Director of Rise and Shine Youth Retreat in South Portland – “I love that NaviTour is building something inclusive at the outset. Being a part of NaviTour will allow us to reach so many more people than we could on our own. I’m so excited to be a part of this community.”
NaviTour is a one-stop platform connecting travelers to healthy, charming, authentic, exciting, and stimulating travel experiences delivered by local experts who enjoy sharing the wonders of home. NaviTour offers a space to organize the entire experience, from customization to payment to guest reviews. By streamlining the support, sales, and marketing process, experience providers can focus more on the relationship and unique value they bring to the customer, destination, and community.