The guides are produced by Guidepal’s local city experts and writers around the world. There is currently an app for 27 different cities. Guidepal aims to differentiate from the traditional travel guides by supporting a number of digital platforms, and trying to offer wider and more relevant content than other services.
A good thing is the guide apps are fully usable offline, without need for data connection, which is handy for tourists traveling abroad. While everythng’s moving to cloud nowadays, mobile network usage on a foreign network is still a big pain due to the high roaming costs. While EU has been able to cap the data fees at least bit, traveling to another continent of the world and you’ll pay dearly for even looking at your browser icon, it seems – Google Maps and other data heavy orientation guides are definitely out of the question.
For local businesses, Guidepal offers free advertising inside the guides. Businesses can also opt-into a “performance-based customer acquisition” where they define an offer (e.g. 20% off entrance ticket / “3 for 2”) that’s tied to their physical location, and Guidepal takes a €1-6 commission when users complete the offer. So far this seems like the only revenue model of the firm. Seems simple enough, but likely there would need to be massive adoption of the app(s) before that is going to generate meaningful revenue. The firm is currently angel funded.
Guidepal’s video: