Firm releases 'anti-Yelp' app

Last week Old Town Creative + Interactive released its Wandering app, a localized smartphone application that maps out Montana’s compelling to-do lists for residents and travelers alike.

The app, like several location-review services, features a map, several pin-pointed locations and descriptions of the subject. But unlike popular service apps such as Yelp, Wandering reveals a list of experiences outside the coffee shop.

“It’s the anti-Yelp,” said John Frandsen, chief product officer at Old Town Creative + Interactive in Whitefish.

Frandsen said Old Town released an earlier version of the app in 2014, allowing a limited number of users to join and add content as developers continued to shape the service. Earlier that year, Old Town won a grant from the Montana Office of Tourism for a technology project that could be used by tourism departments around the state.

The Wandering app is free to install, but costs money to create your own “Wanderings” with text, images and mapping information — about $500 a year, according to Frandsen. The idea is that local chambers of commerce, visitor associations and historical societies can upload their own slice of local life offer the information for free to travelers in the area.

“Research has shown that if you give people a compelling experience, someone who would have packed it in might have actually stayed longer, maybe even stopped at a hotel for another night,” Frandsen said.

He said the Wandering app is right in the market that Old Town has been in all along ­— the travel experience that’s become more rich with the implementation of interactive mapping and collective submissions. While Yelp has gained a huge name for finding local restaurants, coffee shops and other services, Old Town has created a few different programs and websites that direct people to the experiences in between the coffee shop and hotel. He said for travelers, it’s more about interesting things to do than the hotel or restaurant.

A team of six developers at Old Town applied the same idea to their work on www.visitmaine.com, which was voted 2015 Best Travel Website in the United States by the U.S. Travel Association. The website opens with a customization process where the user can choose high-end pampering, gritty local events or family options to customize what kind of Maine activities they wish to check out.

“Despite the huge budgets of states like California, Maine actually won and we were really proud of that,” Frandsen said. The site took about nine months to complete, he said.

Old Town has done projects for a few major clients, including National Geographic and the state of Maine, but also has produced content for a handful of local clients, such as the Whitefish Convention and Visitor Bureau’s explorewhitefish.com.

Frandsen began his work during the late 1990s in Fernie, British Columbia (Frandsen is from Utah) working for that visitor bureau. With a background in code writing and computer design, Frandsen was building locations on top of maps online before Google released Google Maps in 2005.

Today, he sees content mapping as a web tool for tourism sites and local businesses to grow their visitor base. The Wandering app contains two layers of content. The first is a simple map with locations of interesting places, such as the Camp Misery trail head or the Pablo National Wildlife Refuge. The second is a list view that shows “Wanderings,” which hone in on a specific route or group of stops, like the Whitefish Art Walk or a brewery crawl that labels participating businesses.

The app even includes a full archive of historical signs found along Montana’s highways. Rather than pulling over to read the sign en route to the hiking trail, a passenger can read the text from the sign within the app as the car passes by.

“It’s not just finding a local coffee shop, but compelling things to do,” he said. “They need reasons to stick around, that’s the ‘do’ content.”

The app currently reaches across most of Montana, but Frandsen hopes the app will begin to grow in neighboring states. Old Town will begin promoting the service in a few target states, including Washington and Oregon, and from there it could gain enough momentum to grow across the U.S.

For more information on Old Town Creative + Interactive, visit oldtowncreative.com.

Reporter Seaborn Larson may be reached at 758-4441 or by email at slarson@dailyinterlake.com.