In a “critical component” of its overall North America marketing strategy, Tourism Fiji will for the third year running stage a ‘virtual’ Fiji Me online industry workshop for its US travel industry partners this coming autumn.
Tourism Fiji regional director (The Americas), Ili Matatolu said the 2011 exercise was intended to build on the success achieved with similar events undertaken in 2009 and 2010.
A key ROI (Return on investment) metric emanating from the 2010 virtual workshop, she said, was Tourism Fiji’s ability to train 469 travel agents in 42 states across the US with over 3,000 pieces of Fiji information – and all in the space of eight hours.
“The average engagement time with each agent in 2010 was 22 minutes in which time they were able to download welcome videos and e-brochures covering a huge area of Fiji’s multi- faceted tourism offering,” Ms Matatolu said.
This ranged from leisure travel, weddings and honeymoon, soft adventure, scuba diving and the incentive market
“In a traditional marketing sense, given our limited budgets and manpower, this would prove nigh on impossible to achieve,” Ms Matatolu said.
“Travel agents continue to contribute over 80 per cent of long haul bookings so it is imperative that we continue to reach out and educate them on Fiji.
“We have a small budget - we service a big market and harnessing the available technology platforms we use to achieve our objectives has become a critical component of our marketing strategy.”
-Ends-