MICHELIN ALIGNS ITS PRINTED PUBLICATIONS WITH ITS ELECTRONIC TRAVEL SERVICES
Michelin is more closely aligning its printed publications – maps, tourist guides and hotel & restaurant guides – with the ViaMichelin digital services offering, thereby giving today’s traveller quick and easy access to all of Michelin’s highly reliable tourist information on a new website: www.Travel.ViaMichelin.com
ViaMichelin and Michelin Green Guides will together open the doors to a large tourist information and services database that has been in the making for more than 100 years. This offer will bring together all content from the Green Guide collection, which has been fully renewed for the occasion by integrating it with ViaMichelin’s digital technology.
This new service will also include restaurants from the Michelin hotel & restaurant guide selection, detailed maps, satellite photos and the route calculator function already well known to web users. In addition to this wealth of information, the new site will provide travellers with something totally new and unique – the possibility of creating their own personalised travel books, enabling them to plan the trip they’ve dreamed of and see it unfold before their eyes.
A comprehensive search facility allows visitors to the site to make their own selection according to their tastes and expectations. Presentations of each tourist site, hotel or restaurant include a description, photographs and useful information.
A package of complementary services makes it possible to book airline or train tickets, rent a car, reserve a room in any of more than 100,000 hotels around the world, purchase travel insurance or view local weather reports.
In addition to ideas and suggestions from Michelin’s editorial teams, the site also includes comments about the tourist sites, restaurants and hotels from other online users, which are helpful in choosing the right destination.
Michelin has made browsing on Travel.ViaMichelin.com simple and intuitive. A single interface provides information and services that enable site visitors to prepare their trip with ready-to-use itineraries that can also be adapted to individual desires, budgets or time constraints. Eliminating the need for different sources of information, Travel.ViaMichelin.com brings together everything the traveller needs, from the initial planning stage through to the end of the trip.
After choosing what to see and where to dine and sleep, travellers can then prepare and print their own personalised travel book. Similar to the shopping cart on an e-commerce site, the new function features easy-to-use, drag-and-drop technology. The travel book is shown on an interactive map, with a route calculator indicating each stage of the trip.
By the end of 2010, the offer will comprise 90 countries, thousands of destinations, 36,000 tourist sites, 57,000 restaurants and 100,000 hotels, with all the information available in five languages (English, French, German, Italian and Spanish). Other content and new features will be added in the months and years ahead.
This new service provides Michelin’s present and future customers with a resource that allows them to easily and enjoyably visualise and plan every aspect of their journey.
