New strategies to attract tourists
With tourism development, competition is growing between countries and territories to attract travelers. And promotion strategies are becoming more and more excellent.
Among the French who are going to go on the occasion of these summer holidays, some have already traveled on the glossy paper catalogs or on their computer screen to choose their destination. The choice may not have been natural as the temptations are now numerous. “Fifty years ago, there were about fifty competing destinations in the world, says Guy Raffour, Raffour-Interactive. They are not less than 700 today.
Attracted by the tourist manna, many countries have favored the development of hotels or transport structures. The tourist world has also expanded thanks to the opening of borders, from Asia to the former Eastern Bloc. “For a promising destination to become a successful destination, we must at some point propose a significant offer of air services,” says Didier Arino, director of the cabinet Protourism, according to which the two phenomena feed each other. “Airlines, hoteliers, and tour operators feel that something is happening somewhere and they arrive to participate in the development. “
How to distinguish yourself in this competition? The use of conventional poster campaigns would be down, according to Guy Raffour, in favor of more personalized messages, especially on digital media, depending on the type of clientele desired. “If destinations want to attract culture-loving travelers, they will, for example, organize prestigious festivals or major exhibitions for the media to relay around the world,” he says. Or build the infrastructure of panache, like Abu Dhabi with his Louvre. “
Knowing what to propose and to whom
Partnerships with tourist guides for the destination to appear in the catalog, invitations from journalists or tour operators on site, shopping for words to be well referenced on search engines, stands in trade shows around the world, promotion by the cinema (read opposite), work on social networks. “From now on, the promotion must be as fine as possible,” insists Christian Mantei, president of Atout France, the official tourist agency of France.
“We do not offer France as a whole but a multitude of territories and activities, depending on the clientele we want to reach, their nationality, their age or their socio-economic level,” he says. From the interest of some Chinese for wine tourism to the passion of the mountains for young Britons, you have to know what to propose and to whom. “
The importance of “influencers” on social networks
In this emulation, a new category of people has taken a determining dimension in recent years. They are called “influencers.” These globetrotters make travel journals on the Internet (blogs) filled with photos and videos.
“Initially amateurs, some of these influencers have become professional, says Stanislas Lucien, director of Travel Insight, a communication agency in tourism. This ranges from the invitation by the territories visited payment for Internet links on the travel blog, to contracts to produce web content on the official sites of the destination. “
Thomas Daum is a professor of geography and has co-written with Eudes Girard “From the dream trip to mass tourism” (1). To emphasize the crucial role of social networks, he likes to quote the Indonesian village of Kampung Pelangi, in the center of the island of Java. “His images of rainbow-colored houses have been circumnavigating the planet on the Instagram social network. This has made a snowball, giving the idea to a part of the population and neighboring villages to paint more houses and therefore to attract more and more tourists, “he says.
500 inhabitants and 1.2 million tourists
Another example is Vik in Iceland. “It is populated by just 500 people and is now visited by 1.2 million tourists every year, attracted by its cliff-like images of nature that look like a fantasy Iceland,” says Thomas Daum. And yet, the inhabitants did not ask anything. “
Sometimes the spark that lights the passion of travelers seems anecdotal. “In the late 1990s and early 2000s, North American actors fell in love with the province of Guanacaste in northwestern Costa Rica and had their homes built,” says Rafael Matos-Wasem. , geographer and professor of tourism at the HES-SO Valais School of Management in Sierre (Switzerland). Magazines and social networks have talked about it, attracting the attention of tour operators and airlines. “
Since then, the province is facing a tourist surge. “About three years ago, it cost € 1,500 to fly from Europe to San José, with a stopover,” insists the Swiss researcher. Today, there are direct flights from Zurich for almost half the price. “
A destination may sink into oblivion
A tourist destination can also disappear, purely and. “Who remembers the tourist success of Finhaut in the nineteenth century, attended by Queen Victoria, which was a Swiss stop on the road to the French Alps? Rafael Matos-Wasem points. The construction of the Martigny railway in Chamonix put an end to its fame. “
According to the latter, researchers believe that there is a life cycle of destinations. “They are born, sometimes by chance, thanks to a vanguard of travelers or by local strategy, develop, then, one day, collapse and sink into oblivion. “
1.4 billion international tourists
Twenty-five million tourists traveled outside their country in 1950, according to the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO). They were 531 million in 1995 and 1.4 billion last year.
France is the most visited country in the world by foreign tourists: they were 89.4 million to cross the metropolitan borders in 2018 against 86.9 million in 2017. In 2017, Spain was in second place (81, 8 million), followed by the United States (76.9 million).
Nearly 66% of French people aged 15 and over went on holiday in 2018, according to the annual Opodo barometer conducted by Raffour Interactive. 51% of these travelers stayed in metropolitan France; 20% went abroad or overseas, and 29% did both (metropolitan France and excluding France).