eTravel Project

I am at JFK Airport in New York City waiting for boarding. This is the first time I try to fully post and add an image from my Blackberry. Please, forgive me if something goes wrong and/or my spelling is not perfect.

Walking to my gate I did notice this billboard by NYC & Co. (the official tourism board for New York City) that reads “I dine after nine, therefore I am. This is New York City”. I could not help from taking a picture.

They definitely got my attention from a destination marketing point, but not sure how to feel about the message. I am confused about which target segment they are trying to reach:

1) I live in New York and assume that lots of people living in New York depart from this gate. We know you can eat in the city at any time day or night and you take it for granted.

2) This is a domestic terminal meaning that many people have already made the decision to visit New York City if they arrive here. As a marketer, how effective is it to put your marketing dollars here?

3) The fact that you can eat at a restaurant after nine is probably not the reason why the tourists “THEREFORE ARE” and – above all – why they are here now.

4) If the target segment is domestic – which I think it must be (the Spaniards eat regularly much later than that and would laugh at such an ad), the message might sound too arrogant, but very New York.

Any other thought? Given the budget at your DMO, would you spend it this way? I would not.

Jonathan Tisch - Conference Chair

I recently attended the prestigious NYU Hospitality Conference, where I was invited to speak at the alumni panel “Buildings for the next generation” and discuss needs and wants of gen X & Y.

At the conference, I was somewhat surprised with the optimism shown by most hoteliers. While economists and finance people see a full recovery in 2011, they affirm that we are already seeing some good signs of recovery and banks are starting lending again.

Another point that struck me – perhaps because I deal with the luxury travel market – was that most upscale CEOs have decried rate reductions. Nowadays, most properties are discounting like crazy, cutting personnel and increasing staff productivity by cross-training their employees. Corporate clients are in a position to negotiate rates and ask for more perks. However, lowering rates does not always work to boost demand and drives revenues down.

An interesting article about this can be fount at BTNonline.com.

An interesting discussion about business travel and the so called AIG effect.

AIG effect

[youtube width="325" height="244"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKIqGYRuvbk[/youtube]

The Swiss Tourism Board posted a video announcing that it was seeking volunteers to join the Association of Mountain Cleaners. The video claimed, “The Association of Mountain Cleaners… makes sure that our holiday guests can always enjoy perfect mountains. Using brooms, brushes, water and muscle power, they clean the rocks of any bird droppings.”

At the end of the video, visitors to myswitzerland.com were invited to take a mountain cleaner aptitude test and submit their name for a chance to win a week’s holiday in Switzerland.

They got tons of media coverage around the world. No kidding. Simply smart!

Brand: New York City

Execution: A 30 million dollar campaign launched by NYC & Co. aims to attract 50 million tourists to the Big Apple annually by 2015. The tagline of the campaign “This is New York” and the campaign were ironically commissioned to a British agency, Bartle Bogle Hegarty, partly owned by a French holding.

Description: The commercial spot is a few minute video with a remix of Ella Fitzgerald as background music portraying well-known attractions of the city in a cotton-candy way: a cab ride from JFK into Manhattan, the Flatiron building, the water towers, the Fashion Week with Vogue models (???), the subway with the F train to the Wonder Wheel in Coney Island, the Brooklyn Bridge, Madison Square Garden, a Van Gogh’s Starry Night painting at the Metropolitan Museum, Central Park, the Yankee Stadium, New York World’s Fairs in Flushing Meadows Queens, a double-decker tourist bus, Times Square and the Empire State Building.

What We Like: the video is dynamic and flows from place to place without boring the viewer. It is ironic too: the Flatiron building is topped with whipped cream and a cherry, the Statue of Liberty waves at the tourists, etc. The spot is really well-packed graphically and has the ability to talk to new target markets, ie. families.

What We Don’t: most New Yorkers will hate the spot. It is cheesy and New York does not seem the Big Apple you see every day. The city looks more like Disneyland in the video. Plus, anybody with a little background in destination marketing knows that too many icons to represent a place can do more harm than good. New York is many different things to every body, but a basic marketing principle is that you cannot be everything to everybody. The target market in the spot is not clear.

Conclusions: Is New York going to make the same mistake as Las Vegas trying to attract families? If so, the city will certainly lose some of the charm that turned the city into the myth that “never sleeps”.