"Social media as vehicle for tourism sales and marketing are irreversibly the wave of the future."
"Social media as vehicle for tourism sales and marketing are irreversibly the wave of the future."The first time I travelled to Europe, when I was yet in private business, way back 1978, there were not many Filipinos who had access to internationally-accepted credit cards. And there was a limit to the amount of foreign currency one could bring out, certainly not enough for a long trip that I had planned with my mother.
We had to get traveler’s cheques, and I decided to buy ours from Thomas Cook, a British firm in the travel industry which had been in operation for more than a century and which at the time had a branch in the Philippines. I did not, however, buy tour packages, having decided after reading Frommer’s book on how to travel across the continent on my own using a very convenient Eurail pass for rail transportation.
Using Thomas Cook was very effective, especially when my mother was robbed of her handbag in Italy. Getting replacement cheques was a cinch in the Rome offices of Thomas Cook.
It was thus with some nostalgia that I learned about the collapse of this venerable pillar of the travel industry. Yesterday, the Civil Aviation Authority of Great Britain confirmed that Thomas Cook Ltd. had ceased operating.
The closure had hundreds of thousands of travelers all over the world stranded, with flights and hotel services halted. The firm employed 21,000 employees in 16 countries. Suddenly, they are without jobs.
Just to mention some examples of the consternation Cook’s collapse brought: about 50,000 travelers were stranded in Greece, 30,000 in the Canary Islands of Spain, and 21,000 in Turkey. Future pre-booked travels for upcoming holidays for a million tourists had been cancelled.
What brought this about?
The Internet is the major reason. For years on end, travelers have been booking their hotels and accommodations online, and several platforms such as Booking.com, Expedia, Agoda, among others have been very popular platforms. My family and I have been booking online for the last five years.
The growth of the budget airline industry has also contributed to the disaster of Thomas Cook, which like other travel agencies thrive on commissions from the major carriers.
Likewise the popularity of Airbnb, which is eating up into the hotel industry worldwide.
Then there’s Brexit, which created uncertainty in the United Kingdom aside from devaluing the British pound. With the uncertainty plus the decline of travel agencies and tour operators in the industry, it became very difficult for Thomas Cook to arrange for a 200-million-pound bailout from banks and other creditors who knew how bleak the future would be for the company. Not even the government came to rescue the company, knowing how dim the prospects for the industry are.
The fate of Thomas Cook reflects the current state of the travel and tour operations industry all over the world. Those in the industry will need to reinvent their operations if they are to withstand the challenges brought forth by the convenience of the information highway and more and more individual traveling instead of group tours, especially among millennials.
In Taiwan for instance, upon the request of the Department of Tourism’s attache, we financed a run of 30-second television commercials across several Mandarin language channels in November of 2017, looking at the Taiwanese visitor potential in our country for the forthcoming Chinese New Year long holidays.
The first quarter 2018 results were so-so, even dismal when we consider the fact that this was the first time MECO sponsored television advertorials in aid of the DOT. Then came the summer vacation of the same year, and again, visitor arrivals did not perk up considerably.
So we went to social media, and focused on what is “low period” for Philippine tourism, which coincides with the summer vacation here in Taiwan—the months of June until August.
We engaged the services of a very young advertising firm that had a good track record in using social media as platform, and came up with three 30-second audio-visuals featuring not Manila, not Cebu, neither Boracay or Palawan, but the new emerging destinations of Siargao, Iloilo and Siquijor. They tweaked the DOT’s slogan of “It’s More Fun in the Philippines” and said “Fun Any Day in the Philippines.” The featured destinations are not as rainy during the wet season as Luzon. Thus, fun any day.
We uploaded the campaign in our MECO website, as well as in Facebook and Instagram from May till the first week of July, 2019.
Though the correlation is not one-on-one, the results in terms of visitors from Taiwan to the Philippines during the low period (which incidentally coincides with the “lean months” in rice production) were amazing.
Comparing 2018 versus 2019 visitor arrivals during the months of June, July and August, we averaged an increase of 53.66 percent year-on-year. We compared the figures with Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia, and for the first time in a decade, the increments were higher, marginally for the first two popular destinations, and by a mile compared to the latter.
MECO’s investment paid off handsomely, even if our post-campaign analysis discounted the cost efficiency factor to only 25 percent.
Social media as vehicle for tourism sales and marketing are irreversibly the wave of the future. And the traditional means by which travel is operated will need to be recalibrated.
The good thing is whatever the platform for a sales and marketing pitch, creativity is key. And we have so many young Filipinos who are extremely creative and adaptable to change.