Thenzawl Calling: An ICTC case study to promote culture and heritage based travel experiences

Thenzawl Calling is an immersive travel experience which aspires to promote responsible tourism in the quaint village of the picturesque Thenzawl town whilst promoting the intangible cultural heritage of Mizoram in North East India.

The ICOMOS Cultural Tourism Charter positively contributes to promoting tourism while keeping focus on preservation of cultural heritage, community empowerment, social resilience and well-being, and to promote a healthy global environment. 

As part of our work within the Charter, the Augtraveler platform aspires to evolve responsible visitations to heritage sites and further support diversified cultural tourism development, as well as related destination management models. 

The Thenzawl Calling project is a case study where the Augtraveler team collaborated with Mizoram Tourism in India. The project vision was to curate an enriching immersive and engaging cultural and natural heritage experience for visitors to the destination on the Augtraveler app. The experience also evolved as a destination discovery platform, where the local community businesses were onboarded with a mandate to draft out a responsible tourism model.

Thenzawl is a small pictursque town in the state of Mizoram, in the northeastern part of India. The project highlights on how we are aspiring to evolve a win-win model of making the destination more discoverable, highlight its tangible and intangible heritage, as well as onboard the local viewers and business ecosystem to evolve sustainable livelihoods for local stakeholders. 

The ‘Thenzawl Calling’ visitor experience is curated on the Augtraveler platform and this can be downloaded from the Android Play Store, or the Apple Store. The visitor experience is currently available in English and Mizo languages, with a Hindi version coming up very soon. 

More importantly, similar to the other visitor experiences on this platform, we have enlisted utmost importance on the accuracy and authenticity of the curated content. The content is sourced by relevant experts from the Mizoram Tourism Department, as well as authenticated by a renowned domain expert from Aizawl University. 

For ease of accessibility, the users are recommended to download the curated experience when they are in a Wi-Fi zone. Once downloaded, the experience can be viewed onsite without internet connection and will only use the device GPS. 

The downloaded experience can allow the visitors to view the points of interest available for them, which they can view during their visit, as well as serve as a teaser for them before their visit, or a refresher to their fond memories after their visit. Each point of interest has a rich multimedia experience in an engaging storytelling format. There are relevant sections where the experience has evolved bespoke 3D models as part of the storytelling, which further aspires to enhance visitor experiences in Augmented Reality (AR) and 360 imagery.

The Augtraveler app also has a calendar widget, which highlights the different cultural events scheduled for Thenzawl and other regions in its vicinity. The calendar listing is curated for every month (day wise) so that visitors can plan their travel in advance.

There is also a Nearby section on the platform that highlights the hidden gems in the vicinity of the destination and is powered by TripAdvisor. We will be working with the tourism department and seek support from the local communities and partners to evolve this section in the next course of few months. The context here is to make the local community run cafes, hotels, tour experience providers, art and craft experiences, etc. discoverable to the larger visitor audiences. 

Another crucial piece which this platform aspires to provide in the consecutive phases is to provide the local tour guides to curate their own cultural and natural trails across Mizoram under their own business names on the Augtraveler platform. 

This will allow the local travel businesses to build their digital presence, achieve scale in outreach for visitors, engage larger communities to offer curated experiences to the visitors by geotagging them, and they can provide highly immersive experiences. For example, weave your own souvenir, cookery or baking classes with the locals, heritage walks and trails, local music events, storytelling by elders, etc.

The project in this generation of release has also released an online curated marketplace for the local weavers and craftspeople to highlight and bring forth their local products online, thereby staying in course for achieving a responsible and sustainable tourism model for Mizoram in alignment with UN SDGs. We will be working along with the tourism department to achieve this objective. 

Additionally, we have used a new generation of infrared 3D scanning technology which can further set the pace to build immersive VR, mobile and desktop content to enhance the visitor experiences as well as help in promotion, outreach and marketing of Mizoram as a destination. 

To sum it up, with the Augtraveler project we are aspiring to make our heritage sites more immersive and accessible for a myriad set of audiences across the globe.

We have adopted new age technology to remove physical barriers whenever possible. On the other hand, we are also working towards evolving a sustainable tourism model which thereby facilitates in increasing cultural heritage significance for the local people, which clearly aligns with the broader vision of ICOMOS ICTC. (Pankaj Manchanda)