Tourism

While most of the world looks to domestic tourism to shore up their tourism economy, this simply isn’t a viable solution for many destinations that rely heavily on international travel. Thoyyib Mohamed, Managing Director at the Maldives Marketing & PR Corporation, explained how the islands prepared for their July opening and how they are anticipating their strategies evolving in  the wake of COVID-19.

The goal was to make Helsingborg the first place that would come to mind year-round with all the necessary components for a world-class weekend destination - The Weekend City. A new communication concept was developed; WKND by HBG.

Azerbaijan took the world by storm with their 2018 “Take Another Look” campaign which encouraged travellers to see the nation’s wonderful diversity. We reached out to Fidan Aliyeva, Azerbaijan Tourism Board, to understand the key to their successful design identity and how an organisation that is still forging its path adapted to the new challenges of COVID-19.

Tourism destinations are anxious for the return of international travellers during the second half of 2020. As we begin planning for the future, we’re happy to share new research looking at post-COVID attitudes of Chinese travellers.

In late 2017, Cape Town announced that the city was facing ‘Day Zero’ – or the day when Cape Town would become the first major world city to have to turn off the taps. We reached out to Tim Harris, CEO at Wesgro, the trade and tourism promotion body for the Western Cape, to discover how the region is responding to the pandemic and to understand how their experience of the drought has influenced their response to COVID-19.

Over the years, we've been privileged to see some of the best and brightest of place marketing and place branding and place marketing campaigns from around the world, and as we gear up for the 2020 City Nation Place Awards, we wanted to share some of our personal favourites...

DMOs in every continent are pulling campaigns, re-evaluating their role in their community and creating strategies to support the tourism sector when travel bans are lifted. But how can we ensure that sustainability is still a key to our thinking? Nanna Thusgaard, Senior Manager for Sustainable Tourism Development at Wonderful Copenhagen, shared how they are embedding sustainable goals at the core of their strategy.

In our recent survey looking at Place Branding for the 2020s, we asked our respondents whether their storytelling was rooted in place values or focused primarily on place assets – the answers suggested a slightly stronger focus on assets. The COVID-19 pandemic has given us an opportunity to pause and think about whether we want to continue on the same tracks we've been running along for the last five decades or if there's time for real change in the way that we think about what we are doing, and what our places stand for.

As we adjust to a COVID-19 world, we’ve got a real opportunity right now to rethink our approaches to tourism and embed a sustainable approach into our long-term strategy. How can we create a framework that helps to ensure we make sustainable decisions?