Multilingual wayfinding, or how to attract tourists and foreign clients to your shopping centre?

The answer is multilingual wayfinding, which not only shows the way but also eliminates the language barrier

Polish customers (compared to foreign tourists) have enormous ease in making purchasing decisions. This bold hypothesis stems from the fact that they know most of the brands they encounter in shopping centres. How can we help the tourists visiting us? One solution is an application that displays a list of shops in their native language.

How many times have you travelled to another country and gone shopping? It's a natural mechanism. Shopping during travels is not accidental, but a conscious choice for most tourists. CBRE research clearly indicates that as many as 68% of foreign guests visiting Poland treat shopping as an integral part of their trip. This is a huge business potential that still awaits full utilisation.

Since the sales potential of your shopping centre can significantly increase thanks to tourists, the key question is: how to effectively capitalise on this influx of foreign customers? The answer lies in ensuring an exceptional and seamless experience.

Managers of brick-and-mortar shops perfectly understand how important it is to design a friendly shop space. That's why shopping centres invest in attractive design and non-standard decorations. However, when a foreign tourist enters the centre and encounters communication exclusively in Polish, a fundamental problem arises: "Where can I find the shop with the product I'm looking for?"

For foreign tourists, the language barrier is not just temporary disorientation, but a fundamental obstacle to making purchases. If it only leads to disorientation, we might consider it a trifle. Emotions will subside after some time. What happens when the customer experiences frustration and gives up on shopping? They quickly leave the centre.

EasyWay offers a solution to this problem through multilingual digital wayfinding. Imagine the ideal scenario: a foreign tourist enters your centre, pulls out their smartphone, and finds the exact location of the shop they are looking for. Without asking for directions, without frustration, without language barriers. 

Thanks to such a solution, the customer doesn't even have the opportunity to give up on shopping, as there are no obstacles along the way.

Shopping tourism is not a trend, but a long-term direction for the development of shopping centres in Poland. Especially in border regions and large cities. Let's consider Kraków or Warsaw, where the concentration of foreign guests is significantly higher than in other parts of Poland.

Modern tourists expect all necessary information to be easily accessible. Similar to the Google Maps application. After launching, we type, for example, "restaurant" and immediately see a list of different places we can visit. Investing in multilingual wayfinding is not only about improving navigation but also about creating an additional marketing communication channel. Thanks to EasyWay, a foreign customer can:

- Check the availability of specific brands before visiting the centre.
- Plan their shopping route, saving time.
- Discover shops and brands they didn't know before.

Poland is among the leading European countries in terms of investment growth in the tourism industry. According to research (Holovnya, 2019), Poland showed one of the largest increases in tourism investment (+23%) since 2010, alongside the Czech Republic (+22%) and Romania (+22%). This dynamic growth directly translates into traffic in shopping centres. Foreign tourists spend on average 37% more time than local customers if they can move freely around the facility. 

In this context, investing in multilingual wayfinding by EasyWay is a strategic business tool with a measurable return on investment. The application launched on your visitors' devices is designed according to industry standards in User Experience and User Design. This is proof that a seamless experience in the mobile application will directly translate into satisfaction with visiting your shopping centre.

Don't let the language barrier limit the sales potential of your centre. Contact the EasyWay team to plan the implementation of digital wayfinding in your building.