The WWII monument Slavín is one of sites visited during the Bratislava Communism Virtual Tour. (source: Courtesy of Authentic Slovakia)
The pandemic has emptied tourist destinations across the globe and has forced companies and people who make a living from tourism to come up with completely new solutions.
Alternative tour operators have taken the novel coronavirus as a challenge, to which they have responded with new types of tours. One is an interactive discovery game that takes visitors of Bratislava around the city, developed by the start-up Secret City Trails. The tour operator Authentic Slovakia, which provides alternative private and small group off-the-beaten-track tours, created its first virtual tour of communist Bratislava.
“Since we do our classic tours of the city in the old-time Škoda mainly for guests from abroad, in March we found ourselves almost without work and no income from one day to another,” local guide Braňo Chrenka, who founded Authentic Slovakia with his brother Peter back in 2010, told The Slovak Spectator.
They sat down to think about what to do, searched the web for inspiration and took one digital course on virtual tours. Then they bought a small camera and started taking pictures. Firstly they pondered creating a virtual tour in an online interactive form, but in the end they decided to shoot a set of videos accompanied by texts and quizzes.
