The Dubai-based creators of a travel app are offering prizes worth a million dirhams to aspiring filmmakers with a love of travel and eating out, as they gear up for the first anniversary of its release.
Travall aims to offer in-depth guides to popular tourist destinations around the world – Dubai and Abu Dhabi are already live, with the Northern Emirates due to be added by the end of the year, and plans are in place to launch guides to other locations including Mexico, Peru, New York and the Maldives.
The app, which uses video as the main tool for offering a local’s-eye view of destinations, was created by Mediacube boss Adam Ridgway, who is a familiar figure in the local filmmaking community and has a background in TV in the United Kingdom. Since he moved to Dubai about six years ago, his Mediacube empire has grown to include branding, design and production agency Adbrand, as well as casting and talent agency Dotcasting.
The latter's first big job was to undertake all the local casting for 2011's Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, the fourth film in the popular Hollywood franchise, which was partly filmed in Dubai.
"M:I 4 was the first time in Hollywood that the casting for a feature was done entirely online, which was a huge thing for a new company," Ridgeway says.
"It was amazing getting a contract from Paramount in our first year of business. Since then, we've also worked on Sinbad Captain Phillips, and we've got others in the pipeline."
The Travall app features three types of video content. Firstly, Ridgway and his team have made a series of dedicated guides to the cities, which they hope will prove useful not only to tourists looking for a hotel, and things to do, but also to families moving to the UAE and investigating where to live.
Secondly, every hotel, restaurant or attraction that signs up for the app receives a package that includes a short promotional film, made by Ridgway’s team, with a strong emphasis on first-person filming, to give the next best experience to actually being there.
Finally, app users can also upload 15-second video reviews.
Unlike most social-media review sites, the user content on Travall is moderated for quality, with a strong emphasis on cinematography and technical proficiency. The best-quality and most-watched reviews are rewarded with free meals, spa treatments and stays donated by the app’s 1,800 advertisers, who include the Burj Al Arab and Media One. “To encourage users to create video content, we’ve entered into an agreement with advertisers where you get 20 per cent off if you make a video review,” Ridgeway says. “We’re also going to be giving away a million dirhams-worth of prizes – including hotels, meals, car test drives and so on – for the best videographers.
“As we expand to new locations, we’ll be having competitions to send the best filmmakers to exotic new places to film, and bring filmmakers from those foreign locations to film here, too.
“We really want to encourage quality production, not your typical low-quality social-media video stuff – and I think that shows in the way the app is being used. The average time users spend on Travall is almost nine mins. That’s 2.5 times longer than Facebook, and three times longer than Twitter and Instagram. Having that quality content works and users really get engaged.
“The better videos you make, the more followers you get; more followers means more points on your profile and more points means more prizes.”
There is no shortage of travel apps available to globe-trotting smartphone users, but Ridgway feels his version offers something unique in a crowded marketplace – and not only in terms of the quality of videos, both those made in-house and by users.
“We’re basically trying to roll maybe eight or nine apps that people might currently have on their phone into one place,” he says. “People might have a restaurant-reservation app, a hotel-booking app such as booking.com, a deals app, travel-review apps such as Time Out or Lonely Planet. We’re trying to bring all that onto one platform and reward users for using it. So far, it seems to be working.”
The million-dirham giveaway is set to launch to celebrate the first anniversary of the app’s launch in December, but you can sign up now to start collecting followers, points and for a chance to win regular prizes for your videos.
cnewbould@thenational.ae