ACTIVITIES :: eTen :: Projects :: Projects of the Month :: Memo

December 2007 Project of the Month: Memo

Issues addressed by MEMO

Tourism is the primary industry in the global economy. Europe is the most visited area in the world and most European Internet users obtain travel information via the web.
Cultural tourism accounts for 8 to 20 % of the tourism market shares and 40 % of the tourists prefer to prepare culture related travel on the Internet.

Given these promising facts, the MEMO project validated partnerships between public bodies and SMEs in the tourism industry to better respond to the needs of tourists interested in culture and history. MEMO brought together skills from various sectors, benefiting from their experience and good practice to build a cross-border cultural tourism support activity with the ambition that the outcome is greater than the sum of the individual contributions. By the end of the eTEN project phase the partners also validated the potential of ICTs to support these needs as well as a business model to self-sustain the service.

Main questions answered during the project

What do visitors - interested in culture and history - expect from tourism?
What is the potential of cultural tourism in Europe?
What is the competition? What are the best practices in the areas of web usage for tourism?
What public/private partnerships can best support cultural tourism service offerings?
What business models are suitable to sustain such partnerships?

Objectives of the project

Identify the market for cultural tourism, the needs of potential visitors and possibilities to satisfy these needs using existing infrastructures.
Put in place a demonstrator on a limited yet significant and diverse set of sites in Europe, mixing both large and small cities, in highly visited and less visited places.
Observe the reaction of early adopters; identify the feasibility and the maintenance costs of a large scale deployment over several hundred cities in Europe.
Select the business model of this deployment.
Communicate the results to find the appropriate partners needed for further deployment.

Services tested by the project

Potential visitors can find information needed to prepare their travel directly from the MEMO portal
Visitors can find information needed on the spot, relayed via the Internet and/or their mobile phone.
City officials can prepare itineraries through their historic sites, associated with services offered on the spot by local SMEs (hotels, restaurants, travel agents).
A translation service offers to maintain multi-lingual versions of these services and data.

Achievements

MEMO demonstrated:

the feasibility of IT-web-telephone convergence: the same data base, maintained by cities and SMEs, generates information accessed at home to prepare a tour, in public places to support the tour and via mobile phone on the spot, bringing a smooth transition from encyclopedic information to e-ticketing,
the feasibility of maintaining multi-lingual standardized data using automatic translation (SYSTRAN)
The commercial viability of the service indicating that there is a strong demand for cultural pastimes, and that there are skills available (in European centers of interest) to meet demand..

Conclusions of the project

MEMO is a real opportunity to:

Federate various actors of Tourism and Cultural Heritage in Europe around a concrete, robust and validated, short and long term approach,
Use skills existing in tourism offices and local institutions to improve and standardize the web-based presentation of both cultural and leisure service offerings,
Reinforce the tourist potential of cities and regions to attract top quality visitors.

Benefits by the end of the project

MEMO has become the first French-speaking tourist site on Historical and cultural focus, with 260.000 unique visitors per month, 18,5 million pages seen per annum and a top Google ranking.
The eTEN programme allowed the real life validation of a convincing demonstrator showing how to use this basis to deploy a service with a sound business plan,. The consortium has a strong and verified argumentation to raise the funds needed to address 550 European cities in the next 4 years.

Partners

5 cities: Bologna (Italy), Olomouc (Czech Republic), Pécs (Hungary), Toledo (Spain), Arles (France).
1 institution : Chamber of Commerce Nice Côte d’Azur
5 SMEs: Cybèle Productions (France), Media Welcome (France), Moltomedia (Germany), Mobilegov (France), Kydonia Travel (Crete).

Reference data

Project web site: http://www.memo.fr/

More info: contact Claude Richardet
Email : richardet@memo-online.com

Type of eTEN project: market validation

Project dates: started December 2006, finished may 2007

Project coordinator: Gersende Giordano, Chamber of Commerce Nice Côte d’Azur, Tel. + 33 4 93.13.75.24

E-mail : Gersende.giordano@cote-azur.cci.fr