This Year's Tourism Budget

Name: Marco Caceres
Email: htco@juno.com
Date: 6/3/99
Time: 8:09:22 AM
Remote Name: 38.181.64.6
Remote User:

Comments

Honduras' Tourism Institute has been allocated a budget of $1.6 million this year to promote tourism. The bulk of this money will apparently be used to pay for advertisements in trade publications, brochures, and booths at trade shows. I understand also that the Institute plans to open a Miami office (with a 1-800 number) to provide info.

It hurts to see money wasted like this. The "bang for the buck" of paying for ads, booth space, and the cost of renting an office and manning it is so little. This traditional way of marketing, by itself, does not produce significant results.

Forget about ads. Focus on stories and articles by cultivating relationships with writers. I'd much rather spend $2,000 to send the Washington Post's and New York Times' travel editors to Roatan for a long weekend than spend the money on a quarter-page ad in some dive magazine. What do you reckon would be the "Honduras convert" comparison ratio?

Forget about booth space. Focus on developing great presentations, so that trade show coordinators will ask you to be a guest speaker at their events.

Forget about office space. Focus on creating a top notch, daily-updated, interactive website and huge/diverse e-mail mailing lists.

These days, the tools for communicating (be it presentation software or the Internet) make mass marketing so easy, quick and outright cheap. What is this continued reliance on glossy paper and four walls & a door? Printing is not cheap, and neither is renting an office or paying an employee(s) to sit around and wait for calls.