Keeping visitors informed, increasing tourism spend, and improving operational efficiency 🎈

The Challenge

The Canowindra International Balloon Challenge is the main tourism draw for the small rural town of Canowindra in NSW Australia, drawing a large audience for nine days of twice-daily balloon launches and community events, including street parades, a community concert, and the Cabonne Community Glow.

Every year, once visitors arrived to town, the local phone masts would struggle with the increased demand. The organisers would publish updates on social media, but they could not rely on any posts being seen by the attendees in town due to both the phone reception and the social networks’ algorithm deciding what the reach of those posts would be.

Balloon launches are incredibly weather dependent: whilst the plan may be for two daily launches, the reality due to weather may be totally different. Wind speed, wind direction, temperature and humidity are all factors that may postpone or cancel a launch, and these can only be predicted in advance so far. Ultimately, the weather just before the launch decides if it can actually go ahead.

When the times & locations changes less than 30 minutes before launch, getting the information out as quickly as possible remained the biggest challenge. Ultimately, hundreds of attendees would visit Balloon HQ for each launch, asking the same questions: “when are the balloons launching?” and “where are they launching from?” - using the organising team’s valuable time.

The organisers realised they needed a way to:

• Get the always-changing balloon launch times to attendees, as soon as they were confirmed
• Inform attendees where the balloon launches would happen from, as they might use a local farmer’s paddock, the local sports oval, or somewhere else - depending on weather
• Encourage visitors to participate in other events around the town, and buy tickets to the concert and community glow
• Surface local businesses, so that the largest tourism draw to Canowindra continued to benefit local businesses
• Keep schedules, activities, maps, and other event info in the hands of attendees, even when the phone signal couldn’t handle the load
• Reduce the pressure on the volunteer team, and keep attendees from needing to attend Balloon HQ to get the launch information

Why Canowindra chose VIKIN

Offline access was essential for the organisers. Improvements to their website, or increased social media spend were not adequate solutions to the problem, as unreliable phone reception would still cause issues. Canowindra needed an app that kept useful content on attendees’ phones, organiser tools that could be used to send out small & efficient updates via push notifications directly to attendees for the launches, and an overall solution that increased tourism spend and reduced operational strain.

With VIKIN, Canowindra could bring schedules, activity information, ticket booking, personalised schedules, balloonist information, local business profiles and interactive maps into a single, branded experience. Canowindra could rely on attendees being able to receive push notifications directly from the organiser team, to provide updated balloon launch times.

The organisers also wanted to use the app at other events around Canowindra, instead of keeping it just for the balloon week, so multi-event support was also essential.

The organisers had not found an Australian supplier that could provide the same experience, so they chose VIKIN to partner with on the Canowindra Live app.

We designed the app around the realities of a weather dependent ballooning event, rather than treating Balloon Week like a regular festival programme.

How VIKIN helped

It was important from the get-go that this wasn’t treated as a festival app: this was an event totally dependent on the weather for the main daily events, where the organisers needed a solution that would be guaranteed to work even with poor phone reception.

We took the time first to discuss Balloon Week with the organisers, ensuring we had a deep level of understanding before committing to the event. We also assisted the organisers with their grant funding application, providing details about our infrastructure hosting and security setup to assist with due diligence processes.

One of the key understanding was: balloon launch times & locations might be provisionally set for the week in advance, but the confirmed time and location will only be known 30 minutes beforehand. Whilst we already had our content distribution infrastructure in place, that’d send the smallest possible data updates to the app when it was opened to get updates out reliably, we wanted to build a new feature that could update the app database whilst also communicating with attendees.

We decided to build a notification-based content distribution system, so that as soon as a notification landed on an attendee’s phone, a data payload within the notification itself could be applied against the on-device database. This meant we could handle two aspects of comms in one single notification: the visible message for the attendee within the notification, and the app database update to keep the app in sync. By processing the data from the notification itself, before the app is even opened, the app database is already up to date. The data payload available is small - 4kb or less - so larger content changes continue to be made solely when the app is opened.

Our work continued beyond building new software however. One of the VIKIN co-founders traveled from the UK to Canowindra in Australia for the event week, supporting the organisers with push notifications during balloon safety briefings, keeping the app up to date, and providing an extra pair of hands for other event tasks where needed. We also provided support with collecting balloonist’s information, so that attendees could pair the balloons they were seeing in the sky with details about them in-app.

We also supported the organisers with ideas for monetisation, including local business profiles, daily deals and special offers, and sponsor placements. Local business profiles, locations and offers helped turn interest in the ballooning programme into wider exploration of Canowindra.

The outcome

For organisers, the most obvious change was the change of pace at Balloon HQ. In previous years, hundreds of attendees would gather for each launch to find out the times & locations; in 2026 however, attendees could just check the Canowindra Live app for launch information instead. This saved the organising team countless volunteer hours, which could instead be spent on other tasks or on much needed rest.

As information was now available in the app, the notoriously bad phone reception in Canowindra was no longer a source of concern for the organisers or attendees. The organisers no longer needed to hope that social media posts reached attendees in time, nor did they need to rely on other methods of reaching the attendees. By using push notifications, the organisers had a direct route to contact attendees when plans changed.

For local businesses, a clear improvement was seen in the amount of engagement around Canowindra, with businesses reporting an evident jump in visitors. Special offers & daily deals encouraged visitors to find new places to eat, shop and discover.

For attendees, the main reason for visiting - the balloon launches - were now accessible and with the most accurate information always in their hands, they could enjoy the week knowing they were kept up to date.

The VIKIN team looks forward to returning to Canowindra to support the organising team of the Canowindra International Balloon Challenge in 2027.