Yesterday I had a coffee with a friend who worked in Murcia’s regional tourist company for a couple of years before he and many of his colleagues were sacked one Monday morning last October due to recession–linked cutbacks. This is a shame because he’s just the sort of guy you want working on your tourist team.
I was explaining this new blog to him and why I’d decided to set it up (more on that in later posts) and we got on to the subject of nimbleness and tourism. We didn’t open the conversation talking about nimbleness, of course, we kind of drifted in to it whilst he was talking about how they had almost built a really great tourist information site.
And not the nimbleness of flamenco bailarinas stamping their heels into the wooden boards of an Andalusian tavern, either, but the remarkable lack of nimbleness in institutionally organised tourism campaigns and initiatives in Spain.
Almost the diametric opposite of flamenco nimbleness, you might say:
“They’re just not very nimble and they take ages to respond to anything the customer wants,” my friend said as he sipped his cappucino. “They don’t do as much for suppliers as they could do either, because they’re legally restricted to just informing people about things.”
If they’re not very nimble and take ages to respond to tourists needs, what’s the point?
Do these types of campaigns, indeed, have a point which is not related to spending millions of euros of Spanish taxpayers’ money on institutional tourist advertising campaigns that are not in fact very creative or effective? Does anyone actually measure the effectiveness of the campaigns?
Murcia had a fantastic example of this type of governent backed tourism advertising last year with the extremely uncreative ‘Murcia, no typical‘ ad campaign. A fictional professor of anthropology called Karabatic was created to ‘study Murcian stereotypes and choose the most representative one’.
€3m real euros later, he said he was depressed because he couldn’t find a defining stereotype in a region full of such cultural richness and diversity, which led to the campaign slogan: “Murcia, no typical.“
If that’s the best type of ‘tourist innovation’ they can come up with for €3m euros in the middle of a recession, then don’t expect Spanish governments to lead Spain out of the recession anytime soon on the back of increased tourism revenues.
The campaign website apparently received 42,000 visits. €3m / 42,000 visits = €71,42 per web visitor! WTF? You could do better with Google Adwords. How many actual enquiries did they receive? How many hotel bookings? How many wine tours? Maybe someone knows.
Today’s news sees more examples of this kind of initiative:
- in the Canary Islands, the regional tourism department has just launched a new tourist campaign under the slogan ‘I’m staying’ (Yo me quedo) – it’s aim is to try and use Canary Islanders’ own video testimonies to encourage Canary Islanders not to leave the Canary Islands this summer but to explore the Canary Islands a bit more;
- In Madrid, there is to be a European congress on tourism and gastronomy next week, organised it seems by the Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Trade. The Minister will obviously be attending to open the congress and perhaps eat a fine lunch;
- On the Costa del Sol, the regional tourism managers are exicited about the implantation of a new ‘Destination Management System‘ which will help them to ‘encourage participation amongst all parties in the public and private sectors and offer a sales channel for tourist providers to promote their services.’
What about the tourists? Who’s worrying about the tourists in Spain?
