With
the global economic crisis on the one hand, terrorism
threats combined with government instability on
the other as well as fluctuating currency prices,
the Asia Pacific tourism industry is flying its
way through the perfect storm right now –
with few signs of blue skies and a safe landing
in the foreseeable future.
Of course, while these conditions
won’t last forever, they’ve handed travel
marketers one hell of a challenge in the meantime.
All sectors involved in the industry have been hit
hard by the turbulence and all have witnessed consumer
demand slip away, as leisure travelers become increasingly
cautious about their options and exactly what to
do with their discretionary spending.
At the same time, businesses continue
to further tighten their belts on travel expenditure
and look to carry out their international communications
over the wires. The demand for long-haul travel
has dropped dramatically to be replaced by short-haul,
the average length of trips has fallen away and
all these elements have combined to create a distinct
lack of confidence among travelers in 2009.
No travel-affiliated company has
been spared while governments throughout Asia Pacific,
typically so reliant on the tourism dollar, have
seen that all important revenue start to slip out
of their grasp. Malaysia’s tourist arrival
figures for February 2009 have dropped by 7.4% to
1,613,309 tourists compared to the same month last
year. The figure appears to be largely driven by
a drop in arrivals from China (includes Hong Kong,
Macau, Travel Permit / Portugal CI) which shrank
from 99,599 tourists in February 2008 to 73,938
tourist in 2009.
There’s no doubt when you
look at the astounding growth of Malaysia’s
tourism industry in the last ten years, there is
cause for concern the nation could miss out on this
cash cow this year if action isn’t taken.
In the last ten years tourism
receipts to Malaysia has exploded from just under
RM8.6 million in 1998 to last year’s figure
of over RM49.5 million.
Where
do we go?
The government has made no secret
its attempts to lure more foreign investment into
the country. The Tourism Ministry recently launched
the Malaysia: Truly Business website in which it
hopes becomes a resource for potential investors
to research and evaluate the country as a business
and investment destination.
Developed by ISC Group, and applauded
by newly sworn in premier Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak,
the site leverages on the successful ‘Malaysia:
Truly Asia’ campaign. It contains facts on
Malaysia, displaying the opportunities in various
sectors and also directs visitors to other business
agencies.
”Selling the country as
a business destination will also further enhance
tourism arrivals and receipts and it costs almost
the same to market to a MICE tourist as to an individual
tourist,” Minister Datuk Seri Azalina Othman
Said,” says.
“However, an individual
MICE tourist generates approximately 30% more income
for the country and they generally come in large
groups and when multinational companies establish
their operations here, they also bring numerous
expatriates who do extensive travel within the country,
as well as host regional business meetings in Malaysia.”
And while the MICE industry in
Malaysia may not yet be as big or as attractive
compared to Singapore, things are picking up. The
Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre (The Centre) just
won the bid for six international and regional conferences
which will bring in a total of 11,800 delegates
between 2010 and 2014.
Banking on the MICE dollar also
makes a lot of sense for the smaller brand name
hotel chains, who may not charge as much for a room,
but are located in prime business hubs.
“The Summit Hotels &
Resorts are growing each year and offering new products
and improved services especially for the MICE market,”
Zamri Saad, group director of sales & marketing,
Summit Hotels & Resorts, says.
”We focus our advertising
at a targeted market via media publication and print
media supplements. We advertise our seminar and
meeting packages in MICE publications and in newspapers
we specifically advertise in the seminar and meeting
supplement.”
Fix
me up
If you didn’t know it before,
you know it now – medical tourism is fast
becoming an important revenue generator for the
government.
Malaysia Healthcare is a fast
growing healthcare information provider in Malaysia
which has been using holiday packages to attract
more international tourists seeking medical treatment
in Malaysia.
It is endorsed by Tourism Malaysia.
“Health tourism is a new
business, offshoot from tourism, which is now seen
as a serious component. When you go for your treatment,
you have to be sure that all will be taken care
of as you don’t compromise the seriousness
of your health,” Suresh Ponnudurai, chief
executive officer of Malaysia Healthcare, says.
Ponnudurai says health tourism
is becoming very sophisticated and a “true
business”. Given the current economic climate,
he adds that “the government is now looking
for revenue and health tourism is a good area to
look at as it is a potential niche area to target.”
Malaysia Healthcare is a brand
on its own, privately driven but neutral in that
it works with both government and private agencies.
A lot of
the marketing and promoting of Malaysia as an ideal
health care destination is done online and via the
Tourism Malaysia website.
”We believe it is the fastest
way to get into somebody’s house and create
an impact. The whole idea is to brand the centre
and we can’t do that financially because we
are talking about a global market,” Ponnudurai,
says.
Aside from Malaysia Healthcare’s
offline marketing (which includes offices in Dhaka
and Dubai as well as partner agencies in the US
and South America) a lot of customers are coming
through from the Tourism Malaysia website. So far
8000 people have sent queries to Malaysia Healthcare.
“With Tourism Malaysia as
the major stakeholder, health tourism now is looking
at ways to support us into promoting us. However,
health is sensitive issue and we can’t put
a billboard on health and we must get to know our
target market,” he says.
Malaysia Healthcare says it will
continue to create awareness to people who need
their services through health tourism conferences.
A
regional perspective
The formula for success is not
brain surgery. Those who have made ground have identified
their problems early, they’ve researched the
emerging trends and most importantly, they’ve
developed the right message to send and delivered
it across all the right platforms. They’ve
focused on growth areas, whether it be new markets
or existing ones, focused on innovation and been
creative with their use of media.
And perhaps not surprisingly,
taking into account that the tourism industry has
always been at the forefront of online advertising,
and that the numbers of online travel transactions
are increasing at an exponential rate, all forms
of digital are playing prominent roles in tourism
marketing strategies.
So as more and more people begin
to search online for the best travel bargains, the
marketing dollars continue to follow the users.
Be it hotels, airlines, national tourism offices,
travel media or any other sector of the industry,
a majority are funneling a decent proportion of
their budgets into a medium from which they can
track the return on every single dollar.
The
Big Pay-Off
According to Saurabh Varma, chief
strategy officer at Arc Worldwide, the exact message
you want to convey should carry the highest importance
when launching a new campaign in this environment.
“The big challenge in terms
of what travel and tourism marketers should be doing
at the moment is actually focusing on emotional
payoffs,” Varma explains.
“Most people will feel the
need to indulge in travel but at this point in time,
they’ll need permission to do that. A big
emotional benefit for a small investment has to
start becoming your promise.”
It therefore becomes imperative
to have a very clear message which your travelers
can understand and connect with because in this
age of cheap deals, low airfares and value packages,
some key strategies might be simply forgotten in
the madness.
“It’s going to become
so tactical and promotional that people might forget
the concept of the brand,” Varma says. “Marketers
sometimes forget that a lot of people travel because
it fulfills something in them. People still travel
because it’s magical and a lot of tourism
brands tend to forget that in a time of recession.”
So once the clear message is laid
out, it’s then all about delivering it in
the most effective manner possible to sell your
specific product in the current climate.
Digital
Direction
One big player in the region,
Hilton Hotels, has carried out its research into
its consumer trends and is focusing much of its
regional marketing on domestic and short-haul travel
– leveraging the power of digital to do so.
“Even before this recession
came about, we had already embarked on a channel
shift – moving quite a lot of our marketing
online,” Alfie Yee, Hilton Hotel’s Asia
Pacific marketing director, says.
“We’re moving towards
a more targeted approach so in a lot of our marketing
campaigns we’re going towards contextual advertising.”
Yee explains that a lot of money
has been invested in search engine marketing, with
one entire division devoted to optimizing search
terms.
Vincent Kobler, managing director
of EmporioAsia Leo Burnett, who has worked with
clients such as Hilton, The Ascott, Conrad and Marriott,
has a clear philosophy on where hotels will look
to advertise in 2009.
“Hotels do more in terms
of below the line – especially digital –
and I think going forward into ’09 that’s
really where they’re focusing on right now
in terms of maximizing their revenue.”
Kenny Lim, the general manager
of Club Med Singapore, explains that the tremendous
pressure across the industry has forced everyone
to watch costs and find new opportunities within
the market. He says that while Club Med has seen
an upsurge in its regional destinations, the business
is still taking no chances and contingency plans
have been put in place with marketing activities.
One of Club Med’s key strategies
in the next few months is to communicate its all
inclusive concept even more clearly than it has
done in the past.
“We’re looking at
the possibility of a TV campaign to bring an emotional
association to the Club Med experience in the latter
half of the year. We’re also communicating
with consumers right now – whether it’s
on the internet or taking out newspaper ads.
“We’re very interested
in growing the Brunei market because we feel it’s
a market that’s overlooked. I think they have
a very strong expat base – Singapore is also
such a natural transit point for them.”
Looking
Outside The Square
Competition among accommodation
brands in Singapore in particular, which is already
fierce, is set to get stronger with the opening
of The Ibis on Bencoolen hotel and plans for nine
other new hotels to open this year. Expansion into
new markets like Shanghai, in the case of CTC Holidays
which this month opened a hotel in China and is
planning to build around 20 more across the region
in the next five years, makes sound commercial sense.
Singapore Airlines is also focused
on targeting new markets through different marketing
activities. While its primary response has been
to reduce capacity to match demand, vice president
of public affairs Stephen Forshaw says one of the
markets they’ve been putting capacity into
during the last two or three years is Russia.
“The world’s a big
place – we need to go looking for the opportunities
around it to try and develop those new markets,”
Forshaw says.
The first goal in markets like
Russia and the Middle East is to get in and introduce
the brand, principally through visibility campaigns
and advertising on a tactical level.
“Obviously these days there
will be a fairly heavy online component but for
a market like Russia where the online penetration
is still fairly small, we’re still going to
rely on perhaps more tried and true methods to introduce
the brand.
“In other markets like Saudi
Arabia where online penetration is growing at an
exponential rate, we’re clearly going to want
to be a part of that.
“In order to promote destinations,
you need to have transport links so in this case
airlines are the arteries to feed the destinations
with demand. Frankly, with the amount of money the
government’s putting in through stimulus packages
to promote tourism, if we can use some of that to
open access to markets then we do not have to reinvent
the wheel ourselves.”
For low-budget outfit Jetstar
Asia, the challenge is different – leverage
on its cheap airfares and effectively get that message
out to the consumer.
According to Leslie Ng, head of
commercial at Jetstar Asia, the airline will be
using more traditional mediums such as television
and print – two platforms which have proved
successful in the past.
“Airfares have come down
quite a lot so in all of this, our challenge will
be to keep repeating that message to the market
and that’s what I intend to do.
“How do we go about doing
this? We just removed our fuel surcharges which
gives savings to the consumer so our fares are quite
low to start off with. We’re actually embarking
on a new campaign soon which will be very technical.”
Ng says Jetstar Asia will keep
working hard in the area of business travel, having
previously actively engaged SMEs to fly with them
by way of customised benefits to its corporate clients.
Online travel group Zuji is another
player which has been flat out in recent times.
It’s been under the pump getting the cheap
deals to the market, though as its Asia Pacific
marketing director Tai Parata explains, Zuji recently
developed some products to place the company in
a good position and keep up with the massive demand
for its services – both from users and suppliers
– that has grown tremendously over the past
few years.
Zuji launched its Trip Saver Technology
around the middle of last year – a programme
which pulls together all of its available flights
and their own hotel suppliers, which amount to around
60,000, and combines them automatically online with
package deals.
“The soft launch was the
middle of last year and we’re going a bit
more above the line in the next few months,”
Parata says.
“Most of our marketing is
online – it’s cost effective, it’s
measureable and there’s a lot of organic growth
in the Asian markets. We still have a lot of ground
to cover just in achieving brand recognition and
penetration in the online market let alone going
offline.
“Basically we’ve pushed
it through our internal channels, worked out how
consumers respond to it and now we’re taking
our Trip Saver out to the consumer.”
Media
Mix
Asian travel magazine DestinAsian
is also trying to captialise on the online travel
boom. The publication is re-launching its website
with booking capabilities and as Asia Pacific marketing
manager Liz Reading explains, it’s a sign
of the times that they are now looking to generate
most of
their advertising revenue online.
“We’re finding that
our more traditional advertising clients are looking
away from block advertising and more towards targeted
approaches,” Reading says.
“I think they’re looking
for a higher return for their investment so rather
than putting out a full-page advert where they can’t
really tell what the return is, they’re looking
to channel their resources into events or direct
database access – they can actually register
if a person has visited their website through our
website.”
“Our online presence is
definitely something we feel is a bit overdue but
we’re investing heavily in it. We feel that
this will give advertisers a much clearer way of
being able to assess their return on investment.”
A significant proportion of BBC
Worldwide Channels Asia’s output is around
travel, with shows like Fast:Track and Holidays
in the Danger Zone attracting a large audience and
commercial sponsorships have played their part.
“Away from sponsorships,
we have created advertising campaigns for travel
industry clients too,” says Sunita Rajan,
BBC Worldwide Channels Asia’s vice president
of advertising sales Asia and Australasia.
Rajan says some of the broadcaster’s
most interesting work for travel clients has revolved
around multi-platform campaigns, which has involved
“linking a sponsored TV series with print
and online advertising, PR, podcasts, events and
a range of cross-media activity”.
Competitor CNN is also seeing
growth in cross-platform deals and William Hsu,
CNN’s vice president of advertising sales
Asia Pacific, believes 2009 will see the highest
number of tourism groups ever advertising with CNN
in online, TV and their CNN Traveller magazine.
In Hsu’s opinion tourism
groups in the region are “still a little bit
more traditional because most are still leaning
towards magazines and television”.
“They haven’t quite
fully understood the internet yet,” he says.
“They are spending but proportionately not
as much as television. This year I also think people
are going to take fewer risks. Obviously the ones
who have tried it out and had success will continue
to spend online but the people who are just learning
about it won’t experiment with it this year.”
Flexibility, innovation, integration,
creativity and daring to be different. These are
the five mantras that will see the great tourism
industry rise triumphantly from the canvas.
Tourism
Queensland – Best Job in the World
Due
to its huge popularity and even larger media exposure,
this innovative word-of-mouth campaign from Tourism
Queensland certainly doesn’t need too much
more explaining here.
But
its success comes down to the fact the campaign
managed to identify a common desire in all of us
– to get paid a lot of money to do very little
at all.
Following
this, everything else simply fell into place.
The
campaign, thought up CumminsNitro, kicked off with
its job advertisement – a AUS$150,000 six-month
contract to become a ‘caretaker’ on
Hamilton Island – immediately garnering massive
international media coverage. In doing so, the campaign
got people everywhere talking about the Great Barrier
Reef, consequently lifting its profile as a holiday
destination
It
then used the power of social media to make it completely
interactive. Applicants were instructed to upload
video applications, virals hit YouTube, and the
job website crashed in the first few days due to
the staggering amount of traffic jumping online
to have a gander at the ‘Best Job in the World’.
“No
one has done anything like this before and the concept
aims to showcase Queensland’s unique island
experiences and provide something different in what
is a very competitive global travel environment,”
Tourism Queensland’s CEO Anthony Hayes said.
“We
want to show the rest of the world just how amazing
the islands of the Great Barrier Reef are through
the eyes of someone who is exploring the destination
first-hand.” It’s no flash in the pan
either. The successful applicant will post blogs
and upload video content to the Tourism Queensland
website for the six months – further promoting
the region as a tourist destination. The campaign
kicks off a three-year, AUS$1.7 million global marketing
strategy aimed at increasing the profile of Queensland’s
Great Barrier Reef islands.
Discover
Hong Kong – Reality tourism TV
For
tourism boards across the region looking for the
best way to leverage the power of social media,
the discoverhongkong.com website would be an ideal
place to start.
The
site’s interactive corner is outstanding –
including a link to its “Hong Kong Reality
Channel” on YouTube. The Hong Kong Tourism
Board has developed the page with close to 50 videos,
welcoming feedback and personal contributions, as
well as links back to its website which highlight
vacation packages, tours and the exceptional MICE
component of the site.
The
interactive corner also has a link to the “Discover
Hong Kong Group” on Flickr.com, a group with
close to 5,000 posted photos, as well as up-to the-minute
webcams from some of Hong Kong’s most popular
tourist attractions.
Anantara
Si Kao Resort – Spreading the word
Recognizing
the fact a holiday is something people tell all
their peers about and share their experiences when
they return home, this fivestar luxury resort in
Krabi approached wordof-mouth marketing agency Vocanic
to handle their marketing.
The
client, a medium-level player with resorts in Thailand,
Bali and the Maldives, was eager to launch its new
resort without putting money behind above the line
advertising. Using a platform called Groundswell,
a Vocanic creation which is a survey to identify
individuals with influence, the agency is selecting
a group of consumers who fit the ideal demographic
in Singapore and Malaysia and offering them a stay
at the resort with discount rates.
A
photographer will accompany the holiday-makers,
hand over the snapshots at the end and all that’s
then required is a survey to be filled out –
as well as passing the good word on to their friends
and colleagues. “It doesn’t matter what
you say about your product in a traditional press
release or launch these days, if it’s not
any good then everyone’s going to know about
it in 10 minutes through something like Twitter,
Facebook or a blog,” says Vocanic business
development director
Liam McCance.
“With
the economic situation and Thailand’s political
situation, this is a way for the resort –
rather than have empty rooms and still spend on
media – to fill rooms, give people experiences
and keep the money in the pocket.” The general
manager of the resort, Mark Hehir, says the campaign
wants to reach the right people and harness the
power of personal recommendation by letting these
customers experience the resort-stay for themselves.
“These
personal stories and photos sell the resort far
better than I ever could via a press ad.”
