Now tourists can navigate and route their way through their favourite eating joints, monuments and parks in the cities of their choice online with the Union Ministry of Tourism on Tuesday launching a unique initiative, ‘Walking Tours Platform’, for the convenient of the tech-savvy tourists.
To begin with, details of 12 major cities including Mumbai, Bangalore, Pune, Kolkata, Chennai and Delhi will be have been made available online on the website WoNoBo.com, launched by the Ministry in partnership with Genesys International.
The project is said to be one of the first such initiatives to be undertaken in any country. ‘Walking Tours’ is a unique and exciting product that will enable users to navigate and route their way through cities based on a number of interesting themes, said a senior Tourism official after launch of the website at an event here.
It is the India’s first location-based service to offer ‘walkthroughs’ of streets across 54 Indian cities. The website supports user generated content, offers unique social media capabilities and facilitates creation of ‘local communities’ online. The Ministry has set the target of having one ‘Walking Tour’ of each State within two years.
The facility would be expanded to the top 54 cities within a few weeks and it would have mapped panoramic imagery of thousands of square kilometres and close to 10 million places of interest across the country.
As part of the website, users will get full-blown 360° views of destinations and much more. They can access, tag and review ‘points of interests’ i.e., locations, hotels, retail outlets, monuments, parks, etc and also view the interiors of several key locations, all powered by a database of millions of places,s aid Sajid Malik, CMD of Genesys.
He adds, “Decades of global experience in the geopatial domain has enabled us to build India’s first and most comprehensive navigation platform that also incorporates social media.”