Rovaniemi nature and culture were already there. What was missing was a way to find them.

Rovaniemi is Finland's Arctic capital, a city of forests, rivers, historic sites and cultural attractions spread across a large municipal area. Much of that offering already existed somewhere, in printed maps, individual department pages or signage out in the field, but not in one place a resident or visitor could actually use to decide what to do next.

Etiäinen is the City of Rovaniemi's answer to that gap: a digital home for the city's nature routes and cultural destinations, built by Tietotalo on its Mobile Guide platform.

Challenge

Rovaniemi's outdoor and cultural destinations were split across multiple owners: routes and sites maintained directly by the city, others by Metsähallitus, Finland's state forest and parks authority, and others by local village associations and cultural bodies. Each had its own way of publishing information, if it published it at all. A resident wanting a family-friendly hiking route, or a visitor looking for a birdwatching tower, had no single place to search, filter or navigate to what they wanted.

The city needed a service that could bring these scattered contributors together without asking any of them to give up ownership of their own content, and that worked equally well for someone planning a trip from a desktop at home and someone standing at a trailhead deciding where to go next.

Solution

Tietotalo built Etiäinen on its Mobile Guide platform, giving Rovaniemi a single browser-based application covering the city's nature trails, cultural sites and historic locations. The relaunch combined a full website with a lightweight app experience, so the same service works as a complete site on desktop and can be saved to a phone's home screen for an app-like experience on the move, without ever requiring an app-store download.

The catalog spans a wide range of route and site types, including summer hiking routes, cycling routes, accessible routes, canoeing routes and themed trails, alongside individual points of interest such as historic buildings, war-historical sites, viewpoint and birdwatching towers, wilderness huts and parking areas. Multiple content owners, the city, Metsähallitus and local associations among them, maintain their own routes and destinations within the same platform, which is what makes it possible for Etiäinen to cover both nature and culture in one guide rather than splitting them into separate services.

A gamified treasure hunt feature was built into the platform to give families and school groups an additional reason to explore specific routes and destinations, rather than treating the guide purely as a reference tool.

Results

Etiäinen now runs as Rovaniemi's public channel for nature and cultural destinations, combining a website and a lightweight mobile app so the guide can be used both for advance trip planning and on the move during a hike or a city visit.

In local press coverage of the relaunch, City of Rovaniemi digital communications specialist Antti Itkonen pointed to the mix of nature and cultural content in a single guide, rather than the two being split into separate services, as one of the things that sets Etiäinen apart regionally.