Project targets in Marketing were following: Area is internationally renowned high standard single, Visit Arctic Europe travel destination. Region’s tourism volume will increase and profitability and turnover of SMEs will grow. International expertise will be further strengthened.
In concept development and marketing project started by gathering information from participating VAE companies to define market areas. Selected main market areas in VAE after mapping process were: UK, Benelux and German speaking Europe. Tour operators from selected European market areas were contacted for cooperation.
US and China were chosen as secondary level market areas.
Co-operation with European Touroperators has based to created tight criteria, e.g. project co-operate only with new production and travelpackages, production needed to cover at least two countries of VAE and they had to make 3 years commitment to production and marketing production.
Procedure to create co-operation between Touroperators and VAE has been following: After commitment to VAE criteria Touroperators had to show real business case and marketing plan before VAE partners made contract with them. Touroperators had to invest at least 50 % for the marketing campaigns, that way VAE project was able to double the effect of used project money in co-operation with Touroperators.
MARKETING RESULTS:
Through the joint marketing cooperation with following 12 tour operators, the VAE project has resulted in 69.000 new holidays sold for Arctic travel destinations between June 2016 and April 2018. This adds up to more than 515 000 new overnight stays in local holiday destinations. Addition to this 78 new cross-border travel packages have been developed.
VAE Partners made Agreements on Marketing Cooperation with following Tour Operators in Europe:
Buro Scanbrit
Dertour
Discover the World
Glur Reisen
Great Rail Journeys
Kontiki Reisen
Nordic
Off The Map Travel
Prima Reisen
Scandinavian Travel
Tumlare Corporation
Voigt Travel
CHINA AND US
In US and China, the national visit organisations (Visit Norway, Visit Sweden and Visit Finland) formed a consortium for VAE marketing activities. In both market areas the marketing plan has consisted of both communication to tour operators and media in the respective markets, social media marketing and fam-trips to the VAE region. Marketing activities in China were targeted to highend clientele and autumn season.
FAM TRIPS
Project has also organized 40 cross border familiarization trips, with a total of 242 participants from almost 100 different tour operators. The purpose of fam-trips was to give tour-operators a chance personally visit the companies to create direct contact to companies and test the services so that they can better create and sell travelpackages to their customers.
MARKETING REPORTS:
VAE Marketing Results Final presentation
Cooperation with NTO’s in USA report
Cooperation with NTO’s in China report
VAE Fam Trip Participants
