Whereabouts

UI details from across the Whereabouts experience

About

Shortly after co-founding The Tourism Technology Co. (TTC), a company dedicated to building lightweight and simple software for the tourism industry, my colleagues and I began work on Whereabouts, our flagship product. From its inception to its current iteration, I’ve served as Whereabouts’ Chief Product Officer, sole designer, researcher, and occasional people manager.

Whereabouts is software built for the modern Destination Management Organization (DMO) — one that's tired of managing its entire tourism region through, at best, an ill-suited CRM, or, at worst, a disorganized spreadsheet. Powered by our proprietary database of tourism businesses, each Whereabouts instance gives a DMO the tools it needs to collaborate with stakeholders, ensure the integrity of its data, market its region, and drive conversions. Behind the consumer-facing UI is a powerful API that can serve as a backend to power tourism webites.

By leveraging our proprietary, international database, DMOs can create a directory of tourism businesses and points of interest that reflects its region.

Challenges

The tourism space is one that’s still very much tied to outdated tech, and in the rare case of DMOs making the leap to a modern software stack, they too often end up buying needlessly complicated CRMs that were never designed to meet their unique needs. Instead of using a tool to support their efforts, DMOs get caught in the trap of supporting a tool that’ll never quite work.

Despite that roadblock, DMOs do become accustomed to feature bloat and come to expect parity when evaluating new tools. Whereabouts, though, will never be a rival to HubSpot or Salesforce — in fact, we distinguish ourselves by stating that we’re not a CRM. Our product challenge — our task — is to convince DMOs that having hundreds of levers to pull won’t necessarily solve their problems. Whereabouts, as a result, needs to make an immediate impression and its features need to feel essential and intuitive.

In terms of my day-to-day, there's been no shortage of challenges. Naturally, as in any startup, I've been wearing many hats: as co-founder, I'm heavily involved in strategic, financial, and HR efforts; as Chief Product Officer, I'm tasked with setting and maintaining the product experience; and, finally, as the sole designer working with four full-time developers, I've had to work at an incredibly fast pace to keep everything on track. Despite all this, we managed to successfully execute a complete rebuild of the app in a single quarter and have secured multiple new contracts as a result.

Destination managers can turn custom lists of members or events in Whereabouts into dynamic widgets that can easily be embedded on their website.

Favorite Part

Our sister company, The New Business, has been focused on tourism-related marketing for the last decade, and it's a fount of knowledge and research. Having now ventured into product solutions, TTC is equipped with invaluable insights that would have otherwise taken years to acquire. Being tapped into a market in that way is a real blessing for such a young company.

It's also great fun working on a product that feels immediately refreshing and exciting to its intended users — a breath of fresh air after, in many cases, years if not decades of struggling in the digital space. That kind of optimism and support has really encouraged our small but extraordinary team, driving everyone towards creative solutions that I've been super proud of having contributed to.