By Asina Pornwasin
The Nation
Twitter: @lekasina
The Tourism Authority of Thailand (TAT) is boosting its online promotional activities in its efforts to maintain Thailand's position as a leading tourist destination.
The agency is to increase its budget for promotions via online channels to 40 per cent of its total marketing budget. The amount spent on Web-based promotion was only 10 per cent of the total budget in 2008, 15 per cent in 2009 and 30 per cent last year.
The move aims to catch up with dynamic trends in tourists' behaviour. These days, they go online to look for travel destinations and information, to book accommodation and local tour services and finally to pay for their holidays.
TAT governor Suraphon Svetasreni said tourists' behaviour had changed to consuming information from online channels. Therefore, the agency, as the country's tourism-promoting organisation, was obliged to adjust its strategy for reaching target groups by moving online.
"We are forced to have a presence online. If we did not, we would lose competitiveness," he said.
Since Suraphon took the governor's post at TAT in 2009, the agency has been expanding its online exercises and activities. He has dramatically increased budgets for, and efforts towards, online promotion. He also encourages TAT's staff to perform routine business online as well as conducting internal communications between TAT offices throughout the country by online channels.
"We have changed both our inside and outside communication channels, to go online. Inside, we are now communicating and working via online channels. For example, sharing and exchanging tourism information and photos between offices in each province is now done online. At the same time, we now communicate with tourists online through many channels, including TAT's website, the social media - both Facebook and Twitter - and even through mobile applications across platforms including iOS, Android, and BlackBerry. Our customers - tourists - have changed the way they consume information, so we have to adapt in order to reach them," he said.
Suraphon said that in transforming its promotional strategy by going online, TAT was using existing resources in the form of text, photos and video to create content for ready-and-easy-to-use applications for tourists.
Recently, the agency unveiled its official application for smart phones, called "Amazing Thailand". It is now available for iOS devices including iPods, iPhones and iPads and for BlackBerry and Android phones. The application allows users to easily access a database that provides Thailand tourism information in nine categories: destinations, events, about Thailand, maps, bookmarks, shopping tips, Thai food and frequently-asked questions (FAQs).
The Amazing Thailand app offers 89 "most interesting" destinations, with details including where they are, how to get there, and other attractive places and events around that destination.
Suraphon said Thailand had a total of 4,000 tourist places. However, the application offers only 89 destinations, or about 60 to 70 per cent of tourist places that can be reached without the need to hire local tour services. The Amazing Thailand app is designed for free independent travellers, or FIT tourists, who normally prefer to design and plan their own trips by using information gleaned from the Internet.
FIT tourists represented about 60 per cent of the 15.5-million foreign visitors to Thailand last year. Moreover, FIT tourists are known to be repeat visitors who will come to Thailand again and again.
This year, TAT aims to attract the same number of foreign tourists as last year - 15.5 million - but believes it can persuade them to stay longer and spend more money in Thailand by offering them easy-to-access tourism information.
"All this information is in digital format and is most up-to-date and quite dynamic. This is the beauty of the digital format. It allows us to be more flexible and to promote the nearest events. In the past, when we were stuck with traditional media and channels, we could not promote events that were coming up in the next three to six months. Now, our tourism information is fed from local tourism operators and is developed by TAT into digital promotions," Suraphon said.
The result is that, these days, tourists get information about events three months in advance. Instead of promoting only 100 major annual events, TAT is now able to promote more than 1,000 events that are local and small-sized, but are more attractive to foreigners. This not only helps to attract tourists, but it also extends their visits to Thailand, and more days in the country means more expense and greater spending, he said.
Along with its drive to attract foreign tourists, TAT is not forgetting the locals. It aims to increase domestic tourism from 87 million trips to 90 million trips this year.
Credit: The Nation (www.nationmultimedia.com)
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