discover.swiss

A newsletter for every guest is a newsletter for nobody

The destination knows what is happening next week. The guest does not. Between the two sits a newsletter that tells everyone the same thing — usually the three events somebody picked by hand, for a region stretching from one end of the valley to the other.

For the guest at one end, half of it is too far away. For the guest arriving in four weeks, all of it is over before they get there.

The discover.swiss integration for Caymland M4 turns that around. It fetches events and weather at send time — around the accommodation this guest booked, and for the days they are actually there.

What discover.swiss is

discover.swiss is the open data platform of Swiss tourism, run by a non-profit cooperative. Destinations, suppliers and tourism organisations bring their content together there: events, tours, accommodation, restaurants, webcams, ski areas and weather, in a shared data model and several languages. Regions such as St. Moritz, Davos Klosters, Arosa Lenzerheide and Lucerne work with it.

For you, this means the content your destination maintains anyway is already cleanly structured. Caymland M4 fetches it from there, instead of someone typing it into the mailing a second time.

What the integration gives you

• Content from the booking. Radius and period come from the reservation, not from an editorial guess.
• A block instead of an editorial meeting. You place it in the mailing once; the content is assembled at send time.
• No empty frame. If nothing is found, the block disappears along with its heading.
• No outage from a third party. If discover.swiss is unreachable, the email goes out anyway.
• Several places on one set of credentials. A region made up of several valleys can run on one account.

The blocks

Events. A card block of what is happening nearby during the stay. You can set:

Weather. A forecast block for the same place. You can set the period — again optionally the length of the stay — the link, the alignment and the title.

Both blocks are one line in the mailing. Everything else happens in the background.

Tours. Hikes and excursions near the accommodation, with difficulty (easy, medium, hard), distance, duration and activity as a coloured label. Tours outside their season and closed tours are hidden.

Webcams. A grid of the webcams around the place of stay, so the guest can see what it looks like right now, even before arrival.

Every block shows for each entry how far it is from the accommodation, for example “4 km from your accommodation”, and adapts to the phone. The weather days can be clicked individually, in Outlook and Gmail too.

Per guest or fixed. Normally each guest’s booking decides what they see. For mailings without a booking, you choose a fixed object instead, such as a place or a ski area, and all recipients see its surroundings.

Links the way you want. Each entry links to its own link where it has one, or always to a link of your choice. Or it leads to your own detail page: an address stem plus the entry’s identifier becomes the link to your website, and the guest stays with you.

Where the location comes from

The decisive point is how the system knows which place is meant. It does not guess.

The accommodation from the guest's reservation is mapped to the matching discover.swiss identifier. The radius is drawn around that point. Someone staying down in the valley gets different events from someone staying up the mountain — without anyone building two newsletters.

A reservation for the guest is therefore the precondition. Without a booking there is no location, and the block stays empty. That is the honest boundary of this integration: it earns its keep in communication with guests who have already booked — before arrival, during the stay, immediately afterwards.

Which booking counts is defined. If a guest has several bookings, Caymland M4 takes the current stay, otherwise the next arrival, otherwise the latest booking. Cancelled bookings do not count. If a holiday flat is not listed at discover.swiss, the booked place serves as the reference point.

And for mailings without a booking there is the fixed choice: a place or an object whose surroundings all recipients see.

How the fetch works

Direction: from discover.swiss to Caymland M4. Nothing is written back. Your content at discover.swiss is left untouched.

Timing: not on a schedule, but at the moment of sending. The content is therefore as current as the email itself. Yesterday's cancellation is no longer in it.

Per recipient, but not per call. The content is determined per guest. Identical requests — same place, same period — are cached within one send run. A newsletter to thousands of guests in one destination therefore does not produce thousands of calls.

When something is missing, it is missing quietly. If discover.swiss returns nothing or is unreachable, the block stays empty and the email still goes. A heading without content is not rendered.

In the preview you see something. Test sends and previews have no real guest behind them. So that the block does not look invisible, a sample is shown there.

If you want to be precise, choose a contact and one of their bookings in the preview. You then see the blocks exactly as that guest will receive them.

Requirements

On the discover.swiss side:

• Access with the interface address and a key
• Your project identifier. Several projects can be listed side by side if your region consists of several places

On the Caymland M4 side:

• Enable the discover.swiss integration and store the credentials
• A connected reservation source, so that the location can be derived, for example bookings from TOMAS
• Place the blocks in the mailing where they should appear

Setting this up is an appointment, not a project.

What this looks like day to day

The pre-arrival email. Seven days before arrival the guest gets the forecast for their travel days and four events within twenty kilometres. Two guests in the same region get the same email with different content.

The email during the stay. On the second day comes a note about what is still on during the days that remain. The period is not guessed; it is what is left of the booking.

The destination with several valleys. One set of credentials, several projects. Guests in each valley see their valley, and the editorial team still builds only one newsletter.

The hiking week. Three days before arrival the guest sees the forecast, the easy tours around their hotel with distance and duration, and the webcam image from the pass. A click on a tour leads to the destination’s detail page, not to a third-party platform.