by Joachim Fischer, Bangkok, TTM plus
The Tourism Authority of Thailand ( TAT) is confident that its expanded digital marketing strategy will help promote Thailand among local and foreign tourists next year. The agency expects foereign tourist arrivals to Thailand will reach 15,5 Million next yeare, generating a revenue of 600 MillionBath, up to 9 % from this year. As well as local tourists will expand 3 % next year from 93 Million trips and 460 billion bath in revenue forecast this year.
” We believe Thai tourism next year will generate revenue up to 1 trillion bath for the country”, said TAT governor Surapol Svetsreni. TAT has already undertaken nine digital marketing campaigns and some of them have produced excellent results. The governor said its digital marketing schemes had given tourists more informations about tourist attractions and touragents. As well, tour operators can have another channel to promote theier products and services, as well as communicate with customers via its main site at www.tourismthailand.org.
Mr. Surapol said the TAT would also help enhance digital marketing knowledge for tourism operators through seminars and training courses.
Some of the nine campaigns are the ” 50 Places, 50 Thai Tourism Years” campaign, social networking and social media, the response to online community, and the integration of online and offline marketing. The TAT now has a presence on the Facebook and Twitter social networks. The Amazing Thailand fan page has 85.865 members and Thailand Fan Club and go2Thailand on twitter have attracted 14.000 followers.
Apart from the nine schemes, the TAT has a trip planner programme on its website (www.tourismthailand .org) which helps a tourist plan a trip by choosing an attraction, hotel, restaurant and shopping malls and then combining them as a list for a private trip. The tourist can send the list to friends and touragents to calculate costs. Another activity is e-mail alerts on good tour offers. The digital marketing is more and more usualy and wellknown in the tourism-industry. After the time of four colour magazines, broschures tect. the CD, DVD and the Internet is used, like you can see at our website www.tourism-insider.com. This not only saves budget – it is also very good for our environment.
