GREATER VICTORIA – Have you ever travelled somewhere in the world and thought the tourism industry seems out of date —with bricks-and-mortar visitor centres, racks of printed brochures and paper tourism guides? If you have had that thought, it was a very observant one.
The reality is, as with most industries, tourism marketing is undergoing a dramatic transformation. The business is moving rapidly to a highly data-driven digital landscape. In fact, our travel and tourism industry has been that way for many decades.
Priceline.com was founded almost 20 years ago in 1997, and was one of the few companies to survive the dot-com meltdown. Today, travel and tourism is the focus of some of the world’s most innovative companies. In fact, many leading digital brands are from the travel and lifestyle segment.
Modern tourism boards are as focused on the health and performance of their digital and social environments, inbound-marketing programs, automated-sales pipelines and lead-generation systems as they are on the quality of their visitor centres or printed visitor guides.
The reality is the industry is growing and changing so rapidly that travel companies and tourism bureaus, such as Tourism Victoria, have to keep their eyes on both ways of doing business.
Our partners and our competitors are hard at work. In fact, Destination British Columbia has a program in place to help communities think beyond the traditional visitor centre and embrace innovation and technology driven programs. At Tourism Victoria we fully support this shift.
As President and CEO, I spend as much time worrying about the vitality of building out our lead generation system as I do the growth of our social platforms. We are actively engaged with Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, TripAdvisor, YouTube, LinkedIn and, most recently, Snapchat. All are performing well.
This year, Tourism Victoria is making massive investments in our web properties and inbound sales program. Our aim is to have these changes fully in place by next spring. While digital platforms have existed for many years, the notion of focusing on digital pipelines, with completely integrated analytics and data, allows organizations and companies to scale marketing and sales efforts and personalize communications messages for their customers in ways that have never been seen before. This modernization, when complete, will benefit the vitality of our 900 member businesses as they are profiled through our web platform.
These changes are happening throughout the industry — something to think about as you head out for your summer holiday and find yourself riffling through marketing materials that are trying to influence your travel decision. Whether you and your family are influenced by highly personalized digital-marketing or by leafing through a traditional visitor guide, spare a moment to appreciate the highly sophisticated business running in the background. You just might find some ideas to help you keep your own business competitive in today’s rapidly evolving landscape.
– Paul Nursey is the President and CEO of Tourism Victoria. For more information please visit www.tourismvictoria.com.
