This article is about the Proxi admin app at app.proxi.co.
A visitor guide, destination guide, tourism map, or "things to do" map is the digital replacement for the rack brochure: everything a visitor needs — eat, stay, play — on their phone, no app download, always current. This is the DMO and tourism-board playbook.
1. Choose Your Format: Map or Guide
A Map is open browsing — perfect for the "what's around me?" visitor. No sign-up, instant.
A Guide (under Guides in the sidebar) adds a personal layer: visitors register once and can mark places as visited, save favorites, and keep personal notes — a pocketbook of your destination they carry all trip. Registration also means you capture visitor emails, which is the marketing asset DMOs actually want.
Many destinations run both: the map embedded on the website for browsing, the guide promoted at the visitor center for trip-planners.
Creating the guide takes two minutes: Guides in the sidebar → New Guide → name it → Use existing collection. Then in its Settings: the Action Button Label defaults to "Mark as Visited" (rename to taste), and switch on Personal notes on places so visitors can jot "get the huckleberry one" on any stop. Guides deliberately skip the game machinery — no leaderboard, no check-in verification — it's a pocketbook, not a competition.
2. Build the Content Base
Create listings for your businesses and attractions (import from your existing partner spreadsheet, then Get data for hours and photos), and build a collection from them. Attractions without addresses — trailheads, viewpoints, beaches — go in by double-clicking the map.
Set Category to visitor logic: "Eat & Drink, Stay, Outdoors, Arts & Culture, Family Fun, Shopping." Add fields like "Price Range," "Kid Friendly," and "Seasonal Hours" and turn the useful ones on as filters.
Give partners portal access so they keep their own hours and photos current — add each one as a contact on their listing, click the invite, and they manage their own info with an email + code sign-in. A visitor guide is only as good as its accuracy in October. (Full invite steps: A Member Directory Map for Your Chamber or Main Street.)
3. Make It Feel Like the Destination
Branding: destination colors under Brand colors (we'll flag hard-to-read pairs), your logo, a beautiful Cover image, and a Custom font that matches your brand book.
Map style: Outdoor or Topographic for nature-forward destinations, Standard or Minimal for city guides, Satellite + Roads where terrain is the star.
Search bar: in Filters → Search bar, switch on Show search bar, set the placeholder ("Search restaurants, trails, shops…"), and — the visitor-guide special — check Also suggest places from the wider web so a visitor can type their hotel's name and orient themselves even though it's not one of your pins.
Save to home screen (Sharing section): set the Short name (12 characters — "Visit Hood R." won't fit; "Hood River" will), upload the two app icons, and "add it to your phone" becomes part of your visitor-center script. Pair with a custom domain (Settings → Custom Domain & Email) so the link reads visit.yourtown.com.
4. Add Itineraries
Visitors love being told what to do in what order. Build "A Perfect Day" routes: a Short code field for stop order, numbered markers, a drawn route line — one map per itinerary from the same collection ("48 Hours Downtown," "Rainy Day with Kids"). Cross-link them from each map's description.
5. Distribute Everywhere Visitors Look
Embed the guide on your visit-site's homepage; turn on List Publicly for search.
QR codes: visitor center counter, hotel front desks, trailhead kiosks, restaurant table tents, airport welcome signage.
Set the link preview so the guide looks stunning when travel bloggers and Facebook groups share it.
6. The DMO Payoffs
Emails — every guide registration is an opted-in visitor you can reach with Messages ("Fall color is peaking this weekend").
Data — Analytics shows which attractions visitors actually view and navigate to, by season. That's grant-report and board-meeting material.
Partner value — per-business views and direction taps give your members proof the DMO drives them traffic.
Worth a read on the Proxi blog: introducing Proxi Guides, how to create an interactive visitors guide (with template), passes for DMOs, travel itinerary maps, and two real destinations: Visit Hood River and Visit Detroit.