Tour operators will be able to use a smart phone to control their marketing collateral, including the videos and images shown at tour desks around Tropical North Queensland, with an innovative cloud-based system launched in Cairns today.

Narnoo Director and product developer James Wells said the state-of-the-art Narnoo Tourism E-Kit had been designed in Cairns especially for the tourism and hospitality industry to ensure product information at external sites and on their website was always up to date and easily managed.

“It creates a media library for the operator where tour desks, graphic designers, Regional Tourism Organisations and the media can access everything they need relevant to their individual business requirements,” he said.

“The simple and convenient central media platform allows tour operators to easily manage the critically important marketing collateral they present to the greater travel and tourism industry.

“As well as keeping them in control of their brand, Narnoo connects operators’ product media with their online product listings, as well as their own website and applications.

“Tourism sales and marketing managers are always on the road so Narnoo can conveniently be managed from a smart phone as well as from the operator’s WordPress site.”

Launching Narnoo to tour operators, Member for Barron River Michael Trout said the locally designed product would be a wonderful boon to the tourism industry. 

“This form of centralised marketing management is long overdue and I commend James Wells on developing and introducing this much needed technology,” he said.

To develop the Narnoo Tourism E-Kit, Mr Wells has been working within all aspects of the tourism product media industry for more than four years and has 185 Tropical North Queensland tourism operators using his services.

Passions of Paradise has been using Narnoo for its webcam broadcasts from the Great Barrier Reef, as well as to get product videos to Tourism Tropical North Queensland’s consumer website and distributors’ sites.

Sales and Marketing Manager Adam O’Malley said the Narnoo E-Kit would further streamline the way Passions told their story to consumers by bringing all product media such as images and brochures to a central location that could be accessed by distributors and the public.
Mr Wells said the Narnoo E-Kit cost $34 a month, which was more cost effective than building a similar system into each tour operator’s website where there would be charges for development, back-end support and hosting.

Narnoo is also used to manage corporate and product listing media for tourism distributors such as tour desks and visitor information centres and is already in use by key distributors including Destination Cairns Marketing (DCM) and Travstar.

DCM General Manager Sam Ferguson said the centralised cloud-based media library would allow his business to promote the most up to date, high quality images and video in a single, consistent manner.

“This can add value to the services we deliver to customers at our various distribution points including visitor information centres, hotel tour desks and consumer websites,” he said.

“The days of requesting a DVD or CD from a tour supplier and waiting for it to arrive in the post are over, and it’s great to see the tourism industry in Cairns embracing this online distribution technology.”

Mr Wells designed the system for webcams around the region to feed into Tourism Tropical North Queensland’s consumer website.

Skyrail Rainforest Cableway Director of Sales Kevin Parise said the Skyrail webcam powered by Narnoo technology had proven immensely popular.

“The webcam has had more than 60,000 page views since January 2011 and continues to attract world-wide attention, driving volumes of traffic to the Skyrail website,” he said.

“Skyrail is currently planning a second installation to provide even better live streaming footage to the world.”