This is Eindhoven City Guide

Conscious travel is a key part of our city marketing strategy. We focus on city explorers from the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany: visitors within 300 kilometers of Eindhoven, with an interest in design, culture, architecture, and food and drink. They want to get to know a city properly, and they pick where they go with care.

A temporary gift from the city

We wanted the This is Eindhoven City Guide to do three things. First, to offer an alternative to throwaway guides that end up in the bin after a single weekend. Second, to match the way our audience travels: deliberate, local, and curious about the stories behind the city. And third, to be something you can actually hold – a counterweight to all the information online – that points visitors to the best addresses in Eindhoven.

The result: a hardcover city guide that visitors use during their stay and leave behind for the next guest. It holds more than 100 tips from local entrepreneurs and makers. At the back, there is a guestbook where visitors write a tip of their own for whoever comes next. That way, the guide grows with every visitor.

Three editions, one idea

The pass-it-on concept has been there since the first edition. Everything around it we improved step by step.

Edition 1: Your Temporary Guide to Eindhoven
The first edition sat at hotel reception desks, where visitors could borrow it. Displays at Eindhoven Centraal station and in hotels explained how it worked, and QR codes led to online guides on Instagram and thisiseindhoven.com. The guide caught on. So well, in fact, that plenty of visitors took it home with them.

Edition 2: The Eindhoven Bible
For the second edition, the guide moved to the bedside table in the hotel room. Our This is Eindhoven’s City Trip campaign presented the trip to Eindhoven as a modern pilgrimage, ten commandments included, which let us tie the guide and the campaign neatly together: The Eindhoven Bible. That print run ran out as well. The bible idea did not make it clear enough that the guide was meant to stay in the room.

Edition 3: This is Eindhoven City Guide
With the third edition, we dropped the link to the city trip campaign and went back to the original idea. The difference is in how we say it: much more directly. There is now a sticker on the cover with the name of the hotel the guide belongs to, a clear instruction on the back – ‘Leave the guide, share the vibe’ – and an explanation inside the guide itself: ‘Yours for now, not forever’.

Comeback of the guestbook

The guestbook is back too, with a few example tips to get visitors started. There is also an XL version in A3, which sits in hotel lobbies, coffee bars, and museums as a copy to browse.

Credits

The This is Eindhoven City Guide is made together with Eindhovens Hoteliers Overleg (the association of Eindhoven hotels) and the hotels that give the guides a home. Design and production by George&Harrison. The displays for the first edition were designed by 10-4 studio.