Challenge: How might we help lower the environmental impact to adventure travel destinations?
Summary: Prior to arriving at a travel destination we designed a system where travelers interact with a local through a gear rental business transaction. This provides an opportunity for local culture and values to be instilled in guests before visiting wilderness areas. The result is a solution that empowers locals as the host destination and provides travelers with a convenient opportunity to experience something new.
Image: Conducting one-on-one interviews with multiple storyboards about the adventure travel experience.
Our team focused on qualitative research to gain insights about what target users were looking for when planning outdoor adventure travel trips. We conducted a series of interviews to get feedback on multiple storyboards detailing what an end user’s experience would look like from beginning to end.
Image: A user interacts with a prototype adventure travel gear rental platform.
We then created a micro pilot store to test our most fundamental assumption: Do people want to buy or rent gear? After determining that a significant portion of target users were open to renting gear we created an additional micro pilot to test: Are people interested in being helped with their gear and picking it up in the country they are traveling to?
Image: The user experience is communicated physically with a weighted backpack and a wall-mounted visual guide at a test pop-up store.
Next, we created a pop-up store to get user feedback. Participants in our pop-up engaged with a local wilderness and conservation expert who had traveled from the destination to work at the pop-up renting gear. Guests were able try on three different backpacks curated for three different trip types: snowshoeing, urban hiking, and mountain hiking. Each backpack was weighted for the travel length and participants were able to try it on and fit it while standing on the terrain that their travel destination would have.
One of the ways our team embedded community was to have the traveler experience integrated into an integral aspect of their journey upon arrival to their destination. Not only was it convenient to have their travel gear already at their travel destination, an authentic local experience had already been determined via their local pick-up experience. Travelers were directly investing money into host communities by renting gear from locals. They were also able to travel hassle free to their destination by not bringing equipment with them. The primary opportunity created was to have the local expert who was working in the pop-up provide context for the local culture and values before arrival and further local values were embedded in the transaction as vistors interacted with the host destination gear pick-up site.
Community was enhanced by experiences which were communicated from previous visitors who had left messages on their gear pick-up luggage tags at the pop-up. In-Country Outfitters established a sense of community, respect for travel destinations, encouraged outdoor adventure, and promoted responsible land management.