How Timna Park used WishTrip app to empower visitors and reduce dependence on Park’s staff

Timna Park is a 15,000-acre national park in the Arava desert of Southern Israel. It has a spectacular desert setting and is popular for hikers, bikers, and also has driving routes.

It is located close to the Red Sea resort city of Eilat and there are daily tours from there year-round. Timna includes a camping ground and many attractions designed to appeal to families as well as more active and adventurous visitors.

As a large park, an ongoing challenge for Timna is how to distribute their staff effectively. People often require assistance and information but are unable to find park rangers to help them. Staff tends to be concentrated at the entrances and main attraction locations within the park in order to be accessible to the largest number of people.

However, people often need information in more remote spots.

Park Timna was looking for a more efficient way to help their visitors and make the best use of their staff’s time. They had long considered an app to improve their ability to serve visitors throughout the park.

• Timna adopted WishTrip’s tourism experience management software, a SMART tourism solution to provide the information and resources to visitors and to make better use of their staff’s expertise.
• The Timna WishTrip site is packed with information and media.
• The site features all of the park’s attractions and they uploaded 13 different trails for hiking, biking, and climbing.
• Visitors can travel independently with confidence knowing that all the routes are safe and have the park’s stamp of approval

• WishTrip helped Timna to provide training on the new tool for their staff in order to ensure that the staff knew about the tourism experience management platform and how best to deploy it. So, when approached by visitors asking the same questions, or seeking directions within the Park, staff now directs the traveler to the WishTrip app, thereby providing the visitor with the information and service they need, freeing up the park’s staff for other initiatives.

The park’s staff helped us a lot during the process.Ron Berstein, a park ranger at Timna confirms

“As Park Ranger, I am responsible for all visitors’ safety and security. Therefore I always strongly recommend carrying enough water, wearing a head covering and proper walking shoes, and using the WishTrip app. The app both explains the sites and what visitors are seeing, and it helps them navigate the trails in a clear and simple way, giving the hiker the utmost confidence.”

• Upon arriving at Timna Park, visitors are introduced to the WishTrip app and given the option to download it in place of using a printed brochure and map.
• With the app, Travelers are able to navigate a much larger number of trails independently and with confidence. They are able to access critical information, no matter where they are located within the Park. And with WishTrip’s off-road GPS, they don’t have to worry about getting lost.

• We were facing difficulties on how to encourage visitors to also explore more parts of the park.
• With WishTrip, each attraction featured in the park’s site included a link to nearby trails, to encourage visitors to explore parts of the park they might not have been aware of or feel comfortable venturing out to otherwise.
• Whereas previously visitors may only have been aware of a few routes, now they can see a much broader range of options.

• During the process of implementation, we proved WishTrip’s efficiency to provide more information to visitors while requiring less of their staff’s time and attention, reducing costs, and reducing the need to provide print brochures, helping the environment.