Destination Marketing: Changing with the times

The Singapore Tourism Board (STB), My Switzerland and Visit Britain were cited as three tourist boards that have adapted well to the changing tourism marketing landscape by destination marketing expert Roger Carter.

“They are doing the right things,” said Mr Carter, managing director of UK-based TEAM Tourism Consulting.

He said these included making their websites, such as the STB’s visitsingapore.com, more interactive and more compelling.

Mr Carter, speaking at travel distribution and marketing conference, Wired Travel Asia, in Singapore in October, said Destination Marketing Organisations (DMOs) and tourism boards had to change in the new tourism landscape or perish.

He said they had no God given right to exist and could be rendered obsolete by a slew of factors that were changing the way consumers seek information on destinations and buy their travel.

In particular, he cited the new Web 2.0 environment which is seeing a proliferation of social networking portals such as tripadvisor.com or IgouGo or Yahoo Travel where consumers were “telling the truth” about places and experiences.

He said consumers still trusted DMOs’ websites in the absence of an independent, all-encompassing destination dashboard.

Carter said there were three main drivers of change that were affecting the role of DMOs:

• The central role of the Internet and e-business for communication with visitors and potential visitors, market intermediaries and tourism businesses.
  
• Demanding and connected consumers who were price conscious, demanding immediate attention/bookings, expecting rich, accurate information and able to exchange information with other consumers.
  
• Commercial players who have developed over the past 10 years who are now operating in DMOs’ traditional marketing space and who are customer-focused, had efficient business processes, effective distribution and showed continual improvement.

Tourist boards and DMOs had two clear advantages over the new players however – the majority of tourism services on the ground need the DMO to provide the “umbrella” and the public do trust the official tourism organisation to provide unbiased information.

But he said, they must add value by doing things that the private sector does not wish to do for their destination and cannot do as efficiently and as effectively as the DMO.

“DMOs must be clear about where they can add value and offer (or develop) a high level of competency. If their systems, data, processes and customer focus are inferior, then they do their destination a disservice.

“They must become expert in exploiting the opportunities that ICT (information communications technology) and the Internet offer, which must become central to their operations,” said Mr Carter.

To secure the future, there must be interoperability between the different levels of DMOs within a country and they must succeed in e-marketing.

He shared 10 principles to future success in e-marketing:

• Reach as many potential customers as possible
• Maximise the lifetime value of customers, by maintaining the relationship
• Be aware of what consumers are saying about them through community websites and seek to influence it
• Create a compelling website experience
• Maintain high quality content
• Deliver sales, directly or indirectly
• Offer customised packaging
• Engage tourism businesses to deliver the inventory
• Demonstrate return on investment with performance evaluation and benchmarking
• Ensure effective electronic distribution of information to travellers and visitors