Destination Marketing = Passion, Impact, Innovation

Destination marketing is defined as: a proactive, strategic, visitor-centered approach to the economic and cultural development of a location, which balances and integrates the interests of visitors, service providers, and the community" (Destination Marketing Association International).

Destination marketing is practised around the world at both national and local levels. Destination management organisations are responsible for a defined area and seek for opportunities to attract and influence visitors. Traditionally concerned with the overall promotion of appealing images to attract tourists, destination marketing is increasingly concerned in managing the balance between tourism and the environment. Destination marketing aims at creating positive images to promote tourist destinations for social and economic benefits. A destination can be a geographically defined area but it also varies in scope depending on the perceptions of tourists.

Tourism destination marketing involves many stakeholders and is a complex product offer. Complexity and interdependency among stakeholders have resulted in the creation of many local tourism marketing alliances. Why is destination marketing so complex? To name two examples: a destination is not a single product like an airline seat or a hotel bed. It is a combined product, made up of many individual products, such as bars, hotels, visitor attractions, restaurants, etc. It is difficult to present a brand image of the product that will incorporate all elements and appeal to all target markets. Furthermore, destinations offer different groups of products to various markets at different times, it is very difficult for destinations to identify their competitors and target group. This is a problem because identifying competitors and striving to beat them provides a strong focus for marketing activities in other sectors.

Below video shows you some interesting facts and figures on destination marketing.



Sources: Tourism Insights, Science Direct, Destination Marketing Association International

KLM answers every tweet and post in person

KLM launched KLM live reply; a service whereby every tweet and post will be answered within the hour, 24 hours a day. To promote this service, KLM switched for one day from normal Facebook and Twitter replies, to "living" replies with their own staff. In 12 hours over 60 questions were answered by 500 KLM employees. See the video below to get an impression!



Interested? Click here to see more.

As of the 1st of September "Schiphol Magazine" will be issued for the first time. The glossy magazine (for free and in English), will have a circulation of 100.000 issues that will be distributed monthly at the airport. Schiphol Magazine will publish articles on special and exclusive destinations, extreme sports, books, movies, fashion, gadgets and more! Also a special "behind the scene" feature will be one of the topics of the magazine. Furthermore, travel experiences and stories will be shared.

It is a great tool to reach (potential) customers, to create awareness and understanding and to improve and maintain the relationship with the public. Schiphol takes the opportunity to tell their story and to share ideas and experiences which they think are valuable for their customers/visitors. I believe the magazine can grow and expand over time, which can result in great outcomes for the Schiphol Group.

Holidays are full of happiness AND stress!

Research have shown that holidays will bring you not only joy, happiness and valuable memories, but also a lot of stress! (video only available in Dutch).

It's all about... PR in the tourism industry

Why use PR for the tourism and hotel industry? In advertising, a tour operator or hotel can publish its perfect scores on customer service or 95% occupancy rates year over year, but these messages are taken by customers these days with a proverbial grain of salt, because they know that in advertising, the hotel’s messaging is censored . PR generates stories written by trusted, third parties. Customers are more likely to trust a journalist’s integrity because they must remain unbiased.

Think about it this way: you could spend a couple of thousand euro’s for an advertisement in a newspaper or you could use PR to generate a FREE article in that same newspaper that consumers are much more likely to read, believe and act upon. Seems much better for your return on investment?

Done properly, public relations is a highly effective tool for generating awareness and visibility for a tour operator, hotel chain or brand. It can deliver a message of credibility that no advertising program comes close to. Public relations is so much more than the distribution of press releases: it’s about telling a story, an appealing story, that will generate interest and enter into the consciousness of potential customers. It’s about gaining recognition and mitigating negative attention. It’s about defining who and what a tour operator or hotel is and delivering that message to the public. Compared with advertising, PR can be a lot less expensive. Whether you choose to do PR in-house or hire a specialist agency, the cost of PR can be much lower than a traditional advertisement campaign.

Building a solid public relations strategy is important. Unlike marketing or advertising, PR is not as resource-intensive; there are no media buys or direct mail blitzes associated with it. But effective PR requires the ability to tell great stories, that come from the best aspects of a tour operator or hotel’s operations, as well as creative and strategic thinking from people who understand the tourism market and who also understand media’s needs.

Five important PR rules:
• Be newsworthy and think big
• Emphasize your best assets
• Know your audience
• No comment is no answer at all
• Understand PR and manage your expectations

To be sure, PR is labor-intensive and is not automated process like sending out a mass email to a customer database. There is a lot of writing, a lot of strategizing, a lot of communicating and a lot of relationship-building with hundreds of media outlets. But these outputs can result in great outcomes if you put in the time and effort, which can continue to grow and expand over time. And in time, media will be calling you for comment, instead of you calling to pitch stories.

Most inspiring travel quotes of all time

I have a passion for communication and tourism! The best of both worlds would be the ideal combination for me. Therefore, I'd like to share with you the 50 most inspiring travel quotes of all time...

1. “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.” – Mark Twain

2. “The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.” – St. Augustine

3. “There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.” – Robert Louis Stevenson

4. “The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.” – Samuel Johnson

5. “All the pathos and irony of leaving one’s youth behind is thus implicit in every joyous moment of travel: one knows that the first joy can never be recovered, and the wise traveler learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time.” – Paul Fussell

6. “Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.” – Jack Kerouac

7. “He who does not travel does not know the value of men.” – Moorish Proverb

8. “People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home.” – Dagobert D. Runes

9. “A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.” – John Steinbeck

10. “No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.” – Lin Yutang

11. “Your true traveler finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty-his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.” – Aldous Huxley

12. “All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own. And if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it.” – Samuel Johnson

13. “For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.” – Robert Louis Stevenson

14. “Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things – air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky – all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.” – Cesare Pavese

15. “One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” – Henry Miller

16. ″A traveler without observation is a bird without wings.” – Moslih Eddin Saadi

17. “When we get out of the glass bottle of our ego and when we escape like the squirrels in the cage of our personality and get into the forest again, we shall shiver with cold and fright. But things will happen to us so that we don’t know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in.” – D. H. Lawrence

18. “To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.” – Freya Stark

19. “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” – Mark Twain

20. “Travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.” – Miriam Beard

21. “All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.” – Martin Buber

22. “We live in a wonderful world that is full of beauty, charm and adventure. There is no end to the adventures we can have if only we seek them with our eyes open.” – Jawaharial Nehru

23. “Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travelers don’t know where they’re going.” – Paul Theroux

24. “To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted.” – Bill Bryson

25. “Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

26. “Two roads diverged in a wood and I – I took the one less traveled by.” – Robert Frost

27. “A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.” – Lao Tzu

28. “There is no moment of delight in any pilgrimage like the beginning of it.” – Charles Dudley Warner

29. “A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.” – Lao Tzu

30. “If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay at home.” – James Michener

31. “The journey not the arrival matters.” – T. S. Eliot

32. “A journey is best measured in friends, rather than miles.” – Tim Cahill

33. “I have found out that there ain’t no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.” – Mark Twain

34. “Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quiestest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.” – Pat Conroy

35. “Not all those who wander are lost.” – J. R. R. Tolkien

36. “Like all great travelers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.” – Benjamin Disraeli

37. “Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.” – Maya Angelou

38. “Too often travel, instead of broadening the mind, merely lengthens the conversation.” – Elizabeth Drew

39. “Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe” - Anatole France

40. “Travel and change of place impart new vigor to the mind.” – Seneca

41. “What you’ve done becomes the judge of what you’re going to do – especially in other people’s minds. When you’re traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don’t have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.” – William Least Heat Moon

42. “I soon realized that no journey carries one far unless, as it extends into the world around us, it goes an equal distance into the world within.” – Lillian Smith

43. “To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.” – Aldous Huxley

44. “Travel does what good novelists also do to the life of everyday, placing it like a picture in a frame or a gem in its setting, so that the intrinsic qualities are made more clear. Travel does this with the very stuff that everyday life is made of, giving to it the sharp contour and meaning of art.” – Freya Stark

45. “The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.” – Rudyard Kipling

46. “Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.” – Paul Theroux

47. “The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.” – G. K. Chesterton

48. “When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable.” –Clifton Fadiman

49. “A wise traveler never despises his own country.” – Carlo Goldoni

50. “Adventure is a path. Real adventure – self-determined, self-motivated, often risky – forces you to have firsthand encounters with the world. The world the way it is, not the way you imagine it. Your body will collide with the earth and you will bear witness. In this way you will be compelled to grapple with the limitless kindness and bottomless cruelty of humankind – and perhaps realize that you yourself are capable of both. This will change you. Nothing will ever again be black-and-white.” – Mark Jenkins

Thanks to BraveNewTraveller

Destination marketing: Promoting a dream

Destination Marketing Organizations or Convention and Visitor Bureaus/Tourism Boards promote the long-term development and marketing of a destination, focusing on convention sales, tourism marketing and service. The organizations are the masterminds behind campaigns marketing an “entire” destination to meeting professionals, business travelers, tour operators and individual visitors. They represent the hotels, facilities, attractions, restaurants and other providers serving travelers. Nowadays, many countries are launching their destination as a genuine brand in order to keep up with the high competition in the tourism industry. The tourism industry is known for selling "dreams", because they sell an experience and an intangible product.

Spain is operating on the Dutch market for years and is the number two holiday destination of the Dutch. They are highly investing in their marketing campaigns in order to create a fresh and diverse image of the country. It wants to show the tourists to not only be a party and sun destination (think of Ibiza, Mallorca, Marbella, Costa del Sol), but a destination with a rich culture and beautiful flora, fauna and architecture (think of Sevilla, Madrid, Andalucia and the other, mostly unknown sides of Mallorca and Ibiza). Below you can find one of their campaign ads.


Another destination that is investing in their international marketing activities is Jordan. Jordan is one of the most peaceful and stable countries in the Middle East, but the number of inbound tourists is not as high as they want it to be, due to a bad image that has been created years ago. Therefore, they increased their marketing budget rapidly. Below one of their ads.


Of course, a country can promote itself very well, but if a destination is going to be popular, it depends on the willingness of tour operators to offer the destination including the package (flight, transfer, hotel) to the consumers. In order to do so, tour operators are invited to the destination to visit several sites, hotels, venues and to participate in excursions. Furthermore, good press can give a destination a boost as well. Also organizing (sport)events such as the Olympic Games will benefit a destination in terms of tourist arrivals. South Africa is organizing the World Cup 2010 and is promoting itself as the ultimate holiday destination and as the adventure capital of the world. Adventurous it is, because the country has one of the highest crime rates in the world. The message South Africa is trying to put out there, is a little ambiguous. On the one hand the country is known for its rich culture, heritage and wildlife, which they are definitely emphasizing in their communication. On the other hand, notwithstanding government anti-crime efforts, violent crimes such as carjackings, muggings, "smash and grab" attacks on vehicles and other incidents are regularly reported by tourists. Not to speak about the slums which are dominating several areas of the country. There's a major gap between rich and poor. It can be said that South Africa is selling a dream, by ignoring the ugly side and stressing the beautiful side of the country. Why shouldn't they, it just a matter of impressive marketing. A question that can be asked is: is destination marketing an honest and transparant way of communicating or is it misleading and just a unrealistic dream?

The city as a brand

City marketing is hot! London, Berlin, Madrid, Amsterdam and last but not least New York have become famous because of the use of simple marketing and PR trics in order to increase their inbound visitors. I love New York and I AMsterdam are just a few slogans, that made both cities booming and recognizable. City marketing has become very popular since a few years and is expanding rapidly.

GfK Roper Public Affairs & Media, a division of GfK Custom Research North America, today announced highlights from the 2009 Anholt-GfK Roper City Brands IndexSM (CBI) report, which captures consumer perception of the image and reputation of 50 major cities worldwide. Paris ranks as the top overall city "brand”, followed by Sydney, London, Rome and New York. The top 10 cities from the global survey are:

1. Paris
2. Sydney
3. London
4. Rome
5. New York
6. Barcelona
7. San Fransisco
8. Los Angeles
9. Vienna
10. Madrid

The index measures the world’s perception of each city, which influences people’s choices on where to live, work and vacation. Particularly in the face of today’s uncertain economic climate, it’s vital to understand the forces and opinions that drive (business) tourism towards and away from these cities. The index is based on a global survey in which respondents from across 20 major developed and developing countries are asked to rate their agreement with statements about each of 50 cities.