WeChat Helsinki Mini Program Offers Chinese Travelers with Diversified Smart Outbound Tourism Services

Helsinki Marketing Manager Kaari Artemjeff

According to the media of Finland, since the online WeChat mini-program begin to work, hundreds of millions of Chinese tourists have the opportunity to know more about Helsinki as travel destination. Could you please tell us what’s the highlight of the app?

The first phase of the mini application has inspirational content and website-like information about Helsinki. We are now actively developing the next phase. There will be a lot of new kind of content appearing in the mini programs soon. There will be interactive maps and some augmented reality features and lots of practical information, which will be helpful to Chinese tourists to navigate in Helsinki. The app works as a useful tool for them about gives suggestions what to see and what to do, and help visitors to get some local recommendation.

At the moment, it contains inspirational contents, with basic information about Helsinki. It has the English-Chinese translating feature for translation. You can use the feature to help you to go shopping or doing other things. Now, it’s just the written translation. We’re going to develop some voice and photo translating functions in next steps.

WeChat mini-program is the ground-breaking app launched by internet service giant Tencent and Helsinki Tourism Board, how do you think about the app? What does it mean to Helsinki and Chinese tourists?

WeChat is such a tool that every travelling Chinese is using the app. It’s convenient for them to find the travel information within the same app that they are using every day. It provides the possibility to integrate payments and there are endless opportunities to make it better. Meanwhile, it gives huge opportunities for Helsinki to develop such an app with Tencent. It has been a great adventure too.

For the app development we are using the open data. Helsinki is a forerunner in open data – for ten years we have opened government information available for companies, other organizations and people to use. Long-term statistics, precise location data and real-time traffic information are examples of open data. Myhelsinki.fi is based on open data, and now we want to use this open data in mini program to guarantee updated, real-time information for Chinese visitors.

Could you please tell us what kinds of surprises that WeChat mini-program will bring Chinese tourists?

We hope to not only give the basic information that actually can be found on other resources, but to develop whole service path for Chinese tourists starting here in China, in Beijing. They can browse, see what the city is like, and go into the city with some augmented reality features. In the travel phase it will be a practical tool to help navigate in Helsinki.

There is a heart symbol in the article and you can press it to make a list to make it easier to find them afterwards. We also wish to integrate the online tax refund and such kinds of practical features, which will be helpful for tourists.

As we know, Tencent, Helsinki and World Tourism Cities Federation (WTCF) have signed a tripartite cooperation agreement last year at the WTCF Los Angeles Fragrant Hills Tourism Summit 2017, and both Helsinki and Tencent are the members of WTCF. What’s your comments about the WTCF‘s work of making members to cooperate with each other?

I take this as a great example about how well WTCF can help companies find each other and find common interests within the tourism industry. We are very grateful that WTCF recommended us to Tencent to be part of the cooperation. There are lots of opportunities to find such kinds of good partners within this network.

As we know, Tencent aims to build services scalable for different cities. Helsinki is a good starting point and test ground for such cooperations. Helsinki is a growing tourism destination and big enough to have a lots of tourists. Also, Helsinki is small enough to get all the services for a tourism industry involved. We are very cooperative and want to develop our data for many companies.