It’s no surprise that London is the world’s third most visited city, and one of the top-choice travel destinations for Asia Pacific. The place is rich with iconic landmarks and grand buildings, while being one of the most modern, cosmopolitan cities in the world. It’s where royalty and decadence mix with edge and avant-garde.
With travel continuing to be a must for Filipinos, according to the Mastercard Survey on Consumer Purchasing Priorities, many will surely be making their way to London, and the travelers’ card of choice, Mastercard, is making sure that this beautiful city and its wealth of experiences are well within our reach.
Mastercard has partnered with London & Partners, the Mayor of London’s official promotional agency, to deliver smart solutions for the city and its visitors. With the launch of the Visit London Official City Guide app, Filipinos can have access to more relevant tourist information to make planning the perfect trip to this grand city so much easier and quicker.
The app offers personalized experiences and guides using real-time data. Drawing on content from official visitor guide visitlondon.com, and Mastercard’s Priceless Cities programme, it helps users browse hand-selected lists of the best things to do; find hidden gems; browse with ‘must see’, ‘nearby’ and ‘near me’ functionality; and receive offers and discounts at attractions and restaurants. Visitors can create personalized maps (available off-line) and itineraries, plus find the most efficient, scenic, and cost-efficient routes through the team up with Transport for London (TfL).
Making booking even easier and more seamless, the app offers payment capabilities with Masterpass. Users can store all of their card details in one secure place and buy tickets to major attractions within the app, at the touch of a button. This latest Mastercard digital payments technology saves you time, by eliminating the need to queue, and saves you money, by offering exclusive discounts.
“We’re working with more than 70 cities around the world to introduce better transport payment systems, removing tickets to ease congestion,” said Jason Lane, executive vice president, European Market Development at Mastercard. “London leads the way here, but it still has an opportunity to make its 19.1m visitors’ lives even easier. Why should so many people have to visit so many websites to plan their schedule when they can do it with one app that even allows them to book and pay for everything they need? This is what we want to solve with London & Partners.”
Andrew Cooke, acting CEO at London & Partners and VisitLondon.com said, “London is one of the world’s leading tourist destinations and remains open to visitors from all over the globe. We see a fantastic opportunity to use technology to improve the visitor experience and our partnership with Mastercard will help visitors access VisitLondon with the click of a button on their smartphone. Whether you are looking for the capital’s hidden gems or visiting its world-leading exhibitions and shows, the VisitLondon app will help visitors make the most of their time in London.”
The new Visit London Official City Guide app is available on IOS and Android. During beta phase, the app has already been downloaded over 100,000 times.