BENGALURU: If you think you know your city well, join the City Mentor programme and make your city look awesome by helping to craft and showcase authentic and exciting experiences of your city. The programme by Xoxoday aims to build a community of City Mentors across all cities of India to create rich local experiences for the tourists.
A City Mentor should be a resident of the city and know about his/her city. Aditya Shah, VP, Host Alliance, says, “We use to regularly get queries from a lot of city enthusiasts from Tier 1 and Tier 2 cities to help them with local and authentic experiences of cities and vice-versa. We thought to create a technology platform and a specially crafted programme which will help us solve this problem by engaging someone who is a resident of that city to create local authentic experiences.”
So, Aditya came up with the idea of the City Mentor program through which his company can create a community of micro-entrepreneurs and who will be encouraged to share their love for their own city with others.
The travel tech start up has received a lot of appreciation as well as harsh feedback. “Many people wrote to us about things to do and experiences to look forward to. These experiences gave depth to our experience list. We realised that if we are able to bring these city enthusiasts on-board formally, it will give a seriousness to the entire endeavour. Hence, we launched a pilot in Rishikesh and it was a huge success,” says Aditya.
Each candidate applies for the programme online through in a Google form or by writing to hosts@xoxoday.com. All the completed applications are then checked by an on-boarding team.
Shortlisted candidates go through a final round of interview. “We make sure that all the profiles we receive have a social media account link such as Facebook, Linkedin and Instagram and the source from where they came to know about the programme. This helps us to verify,” he explains.
Selected candidates go through a training for one month. “Training would be to given to create exclusive local experiences and on source of information through which these experiences can reach end customers,” he adds.
Currently, they have shortlisted seven candidates from different cities such as Delhi, Mumbai, Mysuru, Bengaluru and Pune. They plan to have 100+ city mentors by August this year. The most popular category on the platform is local food walks and day outings.
Benefits for city mentors
You interact, socialise and share your stories with the growing global community of city mentors.
You get to explore your hobby of travelling extensively
You work at ease along with your current work commitments
You build up your alternate earnings
You get featured on the platform’s city page
You interact with people and help them explore the city well
You bring out your creativity in serving to visiting tourists