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Vivere.travel
Harnessing artificial intelligence technology to help travelers find their ideal destinations
Not sure where to go on vacation this year? Let Vivere.travel inspire you. Supported by IBM artificial intelligence technology, Vivere.travel allows users to browse expertly curated content that showcases the beauty of Europe’s finest travel destinations, find the getaway they’re looking for and book their ideal vacation.
To inspire travelers planning their next trips, Vivere.travel wanted to surface pictures of places that match their needs. How could it tag thousands of images accurately without increasing headcount?
Vivere.travel deployed a content management system driven by artificial intelligence, which will enable the company to aggregate, organize and tag a wide range of content quickly and easily.
Results
the customer experience with personalized content, boosting engagement
time with automated, intelligent content tagging, reducing burden on staff
web developers greater flexibility to innovate and to improve platform
Inspiring adventures
Imagine you’re inside on a rainy day, scrolling through social media on your phone. In between the usual snaps of your friends and family, something stops you in your tracks: a photo of a gorgeous beach; the sun beating down on pure white sands and the deep, blue sea. You check the location tag—Ios, a Greek island in the Aegean Sea—and make a mental note. You just found your next vacation destination.
“We believe there’s a strong opportunity to use quality content on social media to inspire and inform the decision-making process, and help travelers find their perfect destination,” says Matteo De Santis, Head of Business Development at Vivere.travel. “People are inspired by the photos they see on social media and on the web, which makes them want to go and experience those places for themselves.”
Vivere.travel, a digital destination discovery platform, believes that nothing has the power to influence vacation plans like beautifully curated, personalized content.
Matteo De Santis explains: “Vivere.travel is a predominantly visual experience. Using our online platform, customers enter information about their interests, planned dates of travel and budgets, and we present stunning photos and videos of destinations that match their unique preferences. Our aim is to help customers find and book the destinations and hotels that attract them most. After all, a picture paints a thousand words.
“We work with freelance creatives to produce high-quality imagery and other content. What we lacked was an efficient, intelligent way of managing it all—particularly as the amount of content keeps growing as we expand and add more destinations to the platform. We knew it would get to the point where we would no longer be able to manage and tag content manually.
“To enable our customers to find exactly what they’re looking for, we wanted a way to aggregate, organize and tag a massive amount of visual and non-visual content as efficiently and intelligently as possible.”
Curating content
To help deliver personalized content to customers, Vivere.travel selected IBM® Watson® Content Hub as the foundation of its service.
Giacomo Lanza, Lead Web Developer at Vivere.travel, recalls: “What initially attracted us to IBM Content Hub is the fact that it’s a headless content management system—a backend only. This means that we have much greater flexibility in developing the web-based, front-end user interface compared to traditional, all-in-one content management systems. We can take our website down to work on upgrades without affecting IBM Watson Content Hub, meaning that the content team can continue their work uninterrupted.
“We were also very impressed with the documentation of the API—the level of detail is fantastic. There are step-by-step instructions on how to create application packages, and we’ve found the information to be both comprehensive and reliable. This has made life so much easier for developers currently working on the second release of the platform.
“What’s more, support from the IBM team has been excellent. They’re very happy to help us with any questions we have, and we always receive a prompt reply.”
With IBM Watson Content Hub, Vivere.travel gained a central repository for all its content—including images, video and text—that is priced per amount of content stored, not per user.
Matteo De Santis comments: “All our personnel can access the content they need, when they need it—without driving up our costs. This collaboration is particularly important as we work on the second release of our platform. Having a single, central system for storing and managing content has been a real game-changer.”
Personalizing the digital experience
Currently working on the development of the second version of the Vivere.travel website, the company is keen to take full advantage of IBM Watson Content Hub’s artificial intelligence capabilities as soon as possible.
Giacomo Lanza remarks: “We can already see how powerful a tool IBM Watson Content Hub is, but know that it has so much more to offer. We’re planning to integrate two additional Watson services to the solution: IBM Watson Visual Recognition, to automate metadata tagging, and IBM Watson Retrieve & Rank, to improve the accuracy of search results.
“IBM Watson Content Hub will use visual recognition to analyze images for scenes, objects, colors and more, and automatically tag the images with easily searchable classifiers. We expect this to save us a great deal of time and effort in the future. Currently, we still rely on our content team to tag images manually—but as the number of destinations available on our platform continues to grow, we know that this is unsustainable. With automated, artificial intelligence for image tagging, IBM Watson Content Hub will enable us to keep expanding our platform without increasing our headcount.”
Matteo De Santis adds: “Crucially, intelligent image tagging will make it quicker and easier to search for relevant content about specific locations, and improve our ability to push out personalized content to our customers. The more specifically we can curate content for individual travelers, and the more personal and engaging we can make the experience, the more likely we are to grow our customer base and drive vacation bookings through the platform. And by collecting more customer behavior data, we increase our opportunities to improve the accuracy of our personalization algorithm—improving the platform and the customer experience.”
With IBM Watson Content Hub in place, Vivere.travel expects to provide a more responsive, personal digital experience to travelers.
Matteo De Santis concludes: “Supported by IBM Watson technology, we are confident that we will be able to deliver exquisitely curated content that appeals to every kind of traveler, and change the way that people plan and book vacations for the better.”
Vivere.travel is a revolutionary online visual experience that accompanies travelers through every step of their journey, helping them to search, discover and book the destination that most fully matches their interests and desires. Vivere.travel is part of Positioner, a leading digital communications and marketing agency specializing in luxury travel and hospitality.
Footnotes
© Copyright IBM Corporation 2017. 1 New Orchard Road, Armonk, New York 10504-1722 United States. Produced in the United States of America, October 2017. IBM, the IBM logo, ibm.com, and IBM Watson are trademarks of International Business Machines Corp., registered in many jurisdictions worldwide. Other product and service names might be trademarks of IBM or other companies. A current list of IBM trademarks is available on the web at “Copyright and trademark information” at ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtml. This document is current as of the initial date of publication and may be changed by IBM at any time. Not all offerings are available in every country in which IBM operates. The client examples cited are presented for illustrative purposes only. Actual performance results may vary depending on specific configurations and operating conditions. THE INFORMATION IN THIS DOCUMENT IS PROVIDED “AS IS” WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING WITHOUT ANY WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND ANY WARRANTY OR CONDITION OF NON-INFRINGEMENT. IBM products are warranted according to the terms and conditions of the agreements under which they are provided. The client is responsible for ensuring compliance with laws and regulations applicable to it. IBM does not provide legal advice or represent or warrant that its services or products will ensure that the client is in compliance with any law or regulation.
