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Trails
Your guide to running trails on the Vicinity platform
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Why are trails so powerful?
Over 1,000 trails have been hosted on the Vicinity platform, with over 1.1 million interactions with users. Trails are versatile and powerful tools to help people navigate around your place and provide them with an engaging experience.
Whether you are running an trail with physical installations, coming up with your own trail concept, or choosing a trail from the Vicinity catalogue, you can use Vicinity to host your trail and provide your trail-goers with a digital option.
Trail types
Evergreen trails
Evergreen trails are permanent trails. Examples include art, sculpture, history, wayfinding, sight-seeing or other permanent features of your place.
Evergreen trails can also include business groupings like ‘dog friendly cafés’, ‘vegan food’, ‘cocktail’ or ‘ladies shoes’. Evergreen trails are super popular with tourists and user groups with specific interests
Use evergreen trails to help users navigate around your place, and find types of businesses that matter to them.
Event trails
Event trails happen for a specific reason and period of time. Examples include Easter Treasure Hunt trails, Halloween pumpkin trails, seasonal Ale trails, and ‘In Bloom trails’.
Often these event trails can be matched with physical installations like Dinosaur trails, Brick-live trails or Monsters in order to help users find all the different installations.
Event trails can also be interactive and gamified, whether that is collecting all the locations, completing tasks at those locations or giving users an experience. Event trails are super popular with families
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Where are my trails hosted?
Trails can be hosted on mobile apps available through the app store. If your town or city has an app on the Vicinity platform then this is the best place to host your trail. Find examples here. For all other places, your trail can be hosted on the LoyalFree app.
Make your trails interactive
Interactive trails are superb experiences for all the family. Whether completing a mission, going on a hunt or collecting answers from all the locations, an interactive trail is a fantastic day out.
In a 2023 study, we learnt that an average trail participant is in a group of at least 3 people, spends over £35 and visits 13 locations on route.
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Really simply, require participants to scan a QR code at all the locations to show that they have visited.
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Really simply, require users to click a button to check-in at a location. This will show they have visited the required spot.
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Add videos, audio or even augmented reality to provide users with an informative or engaging experience asthey navigateyour trail.
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Ask your users questions, for which they can find the answers by scanning a QR code at each location.
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Hide an anagram letter behind a QR code at each location on a trail. Grat fun for families as they try and work out the answer.
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Ask users to vote for their favourate location with voting trails.
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Installation trails
Are you running a trail of physical installations?
Use the Vicinity platform to host your trail digitally and track entrants.
Previous examples include monster trails, brick live, light installations, Christmas nutcrackers, pumpkins and real life dinosaurs!
Trail case studies
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Vicinity Trails catalogue
Don’t know what trail to run? Why not pick one from the Vicinity catalogue to get you started?