In December 2014, Solimar hosted a group of 11 tour operators and travel agents from East Africa and the United States to explore Rwanda first hand as part of a program with the Rwanda Development Board (RDB) to expand global awareness of the country’s diverse attraction, increase the number of available Rwanda itineraries, and boost the volume of Rwanda itineraries sold.

Rwanda is home to one of the world’s most incredible wildlife experiences – an intimate trek with the Virunga Mountain gorillas. Visitors from all over the world descend on the iconic Volcanoes National Park to be close to the stately, playful primates. For many companies based in East Africa that service local and international clientele, Rwanda is only sold as a two-day gorilla extension to longer safaris in Kenya and Tanzania. But Rwanda is so much more.

The international tour operators visited a diverse set of cultural and natural attractions. Rubavu, Musanze, Volcanoes National Park, and Nyungwe National Park. The program concluded with a networking session with local Rwandan tour operators, hoteliers, and tourism service providers in order to create new working business relationships.

The program proved a great success. Surveys taken by the trip participants before and after their time in Rwanda showed a significant shift in positive perceptions of the destination – including better understanding of how both nature and cultural attractions would be relevant to their clientele. As a result, every operator will now list itineraries of 5 days or more in 2015 – nearly doubling the average itinerary length offered by the group before the trip. Over 80% of participants stated that the trip will help them boost sales by at least 50%.

The RDB has set an ambitious goal of 10% increase in visitation year-over-year. The East African market is an essential component in meeting this target. The timing of this familiarization trip with the East African operators was strategic.

Despite a 6% growth in visitation last year, travel to Kenya and Tanzania have been flagging in the wake of global press about the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. According to National Geographic Tanzania’s hotels have reported a 30 percent drop in business while 2015 bookings have plummeted 50 percent.

Rwanda provides a salvation for many of the tour operators on the trip. The country’s perception as a safe, clean, and “undiscovered” destination provides a desirable sales alternative for travel companies that have heavily relied on safari bookings and Indian Ocean beach trips.

Solimar, in conjunction with the National Geographic Society Maps Division, recently wrapped up work in the Colombian archipelago of San Andres, Providencia, and Santa Catalina. The Geotourism program focused on improving market access for small and medium sized tourism businesses on the islands by sharing and promoting the stories of local people and the unique attractions of the islands.

Even though the project is over, we’ve reached a new milestone!

We are pleased to announce the launch of a brand new destination video, featuring local voices from San Andres, Providencia and Santa Catalina that tell the stories of their islands.

The video, created by project partner Gregg Bleakney gives a breathtaking overview of the region, and most importantly, introduces the viewer to the region from a local perspective- an aspect that makes it unique among most destination videos.

This destination video reflects the very important work the Geotourism program implemented in the Colombian archipelago, prioritizing and working with local communities, and making them the focus of sustainable tourism development in the region.

THE ARCHIPELAGO

The archipelago lies in the heart of the Seaflower Biosphere Reserve, one of the world’s largest biosphere reserves. Given this location, there are myriad activities and attractions for tourists; yet due to environmental problems, high population density, and increasing poverty, the region has struggled in recent years. As tourism was identified as a key component to the stimulation and revival of the local economy, our challenge was to enhance the archipelago’s tourism offerings in a sustainable manner, incorporating preservation of local environments, cultures, traditions and people by improving market access for local businesses and tourism stakeholders to the tourism sector.

To this end, the video does a fantastic job of highlighting the people and places that make the archipelago and its environment so special. By combining the songs and voices of the people with beautiful, iconic imagery, the viewer gets a great sense of what the island has to offer.

SOLIMAR AND THE GEOTOURISM PROJECT

Solimar’s main role in this project was contributing to the creation of a National Geographic cobranded Geotourism website that would act as a platform for local businesses and vendors to tell their stories and select key messages, attractions, and experiences in the region to convey to potential visitors. The Geotourism website not only increased the number of visitors to the region, it also attracted the type of visitors most likely to enjoy the cultural and natural experiences of the archipelago.

After building the website, Solimar and its partners came up with a marketing strategy and targeted key travel markets that would be interested in the region. Aside from social media and online campaigns, a key component of this marketing strategy is this video, which has just been finished up and can be viewed right here:

THE DESTINATION VIDEO

As we have seen, videos have become more and more important to destination marketing campaigns and brand recognition. A 2013 study by Google reveals videos influence the choice of next travel destination of 63% of leisure travelers and 66% of business travelers. See the graphic below on how the travel funnel works, and the significant role videos play in the initial steps of the process.

The video tells the unique story of the locals and what they love most about their region through a combination of stunning visuals and beautiful audio. It stays in line with the theme of the campaign, conservation and preservation, while effectively marketing the magnificence of the location and its attractions to potential visitors, like the beaches, scuba diving, food, and music. It successfully conveys the authentic sense of place of the region and stands out from the advertisements you see everyday.

We’re convinced to go, how about you?

In late 2014, Solimar International began working with the Great Himalaya Trail (GHT) in Nepal.  The GHT is a network of trails that currently span across the Nepali Himalayas. The experiences offered along these trails are rough, but unforgettable. Trekkers are afforded spectacular views of the most breathtaking mountain range on earth, they have meaningful exchanges with Nepali people and push their own physical limits in some of the world’s most challenging trails.  The GHT also seeks to promote responsible tourism in Nepal, and is used to unite the trekking industry around this concept.

Nepal is on the bucket list of most adventure travelers, specifically, the Everest Base Camp Trek, which is accessible but adventurous and provides a glimpse of one of the world’s great natural wonders. As a result, most tourists to Nepal visit the same well trodden destinations. The GHT encourages tourists to get out and explore the rest of the mountain range, which stretches across the entire country.

The GHT is currently being managed by the Samarth-Nepal Market Development Project, which is funded by DFID and contracted to Adam Smith International. They inherited this tourism product from a former DFID project and needed support from tourism experts to help transition the GHT to new management.

Management of the GHT comprises several components, namely product development, marketing and trail management.

Solimar was initially asked to focus on GHT tourism branding, a destination assessment and identify an organization to take over the GHT website. During this contract period, our team traveled to Nepal and met with GHT stakeholders from associations, tour operators, guides and government organizations. We provided Samarth-NMDP with seven possible scenarios for moving forward.

We were delighted to renew our contract with Adam Smith for 2015, and in the coming year Solimar will be working with GHT stakeholders to build a fresh website for the GHT, including compelling content for social channels and support the transition to a new management structure.

The GHT has the opportunity to be a truly iconic product for Nepal: it provides both a base for activities and a unifying concept for the variety of attractions the destination has to offer. It exemplifies the concept of site doing, not site seeing. Solimar is looking forward to working with Samarth-NMDP in 2015 to help the GHT realize its full potential.

Solimar International is pleased to announce that we have signed a three-year contract to represent the Myanmar Tourism Federation (MTF) in North America. Together, MTF and Solimar will work to position Myanmar as an exciting, exotic and undiscovered destination for North American tourists.

Myanmar has an untouched quality that gives visitors the experience of feeling like they are the first to stumble upon its floating gardens and golden temples. In order to maintain this feeling of novelty, we will work with MTF to support sustainable, long-term growth for the Myanmar tourism sector by attracting high-value, low impact tourists to minimize tourist influence on Myanmar’s fragile environment.

OUR OBJECTIVES

Specifically, Solimar’s objectives are:

1. To effectively communicate the unique selling points of Myanmar to North American trade, media and tourists
2. To ensure that the Myanmar message reaches a receptive audience
3. To increase the number of North American tourists and their length of stay in Myanmar, and to create repeat visitation
4. To support market access for Myanmar’s small and medium sized enterprises

OUR APPROACH

Solimar is taking a five-pronged approach to provide marketing representation to MTF. 

1. We will open an MTF office in Washington, DC that will respond to inquiries from tourists, travel trade, and media. The MTF office will regularly meet with the Myanmar Embassy in DC to identify potential areas of collaboration. 
2. We will work with media to identify compelling storylines and host press trips for top journalists. As North American tourists are consistently inspired by stories in the media, it is vital that these stories reflect Myanmar’s unique characteristics accurately. 
3. We will work to develop strong partnerships between Myanmar inbound tour operators and outbound North American operators. In order to do this, Solimar will organize familiarization trips to ensure that North American tour operators have experienced Myanmar firsthand, creating passionate brand ambassadors and educated sales people. Furthermore, Solimar will work with trade operators currently selling Myanmar to ensure that they are up to date on new niche activities, and are able to market the destination with the accurate, remarkable content they need.
4. We will work to optimize Myanmar travel and create a robust online presence for MTF. This will include content creation around a trade and media page, as well as the creation of a simple social media strategy for Facebook and Instagram. 
5. We will attend strategic trade events in North America on behalf of MTF in order to meet with trade and media partners to build relationships.

Both Solimar and MTF are committed to ensuring that tourism continues to provide an important contribution to Myanmar’s economy. The Minister of Hotels and Tourism, H.E. Htay Aung has referred to the partnership as a “milestone in our history.” Solimar is also very excited about this opportunity to help market one of Asia’s most unique up-and-coming travel destinations.

Destination Arctic Circle in Greenland, a destination marketing organization supported by Solimar, produced a new social media video campaign to set their destination apart from other arctic locations. 

When I ask people what they think of when they think of Greenland, they inevitably say something like “volcanoes” or “Bjork” – both of which belong to Iceland. For some reason (geographic proximity? identical suffixes?), Greenland gets assigned Icelands assets and liabilities all the time, even by discerning and experienced travelers.

Because of this, raising brand awareness has always been a priority of the national Greenlandic tourism board (Visit Greenland ), as well as the four regional tourism boards.

This month, I spent a few weeks up in Greenland working with one of the regional tourism boards, Destination Arctic Circle  (DAC), on the second phase of a project called Rough.Real.Remote. These three words are the tag-line for the brand of DAC ,which was designed in 2010 to shift the tourism narrative away from outdated elements that were resulting in unrealistic tourist expectations (igloos, Inuits, etc.) and toward the true modern, arctic life that tourists actually encounter when visiting Greenland today.

Once this brand was articulated, DAC had to decide how to effectively (and cheaply) bring it to life. The chosen medium was video, and in April 2011, we created six short films for social media that focused on winter tourism products.

The videos accomplished what we had hope: they delighted stakeholders and captured the imagination of tourists. So this year, we started working on Phase 2 – six short films about summer products; only with a solid proof of concept from last year, we were able to pull in more sponsors and collaborate with Red Bull who sent Petr Kraus , a World Champion trial biker (a trial biker, as I learned, is a biker that jumps over stuff, often very big stuff) to star in the videos.

The focus of summer products (kayaking, hiking on the icecap, visiting settlements, biking, and fly-fishing) will hopefully inspire tourists in the destination awareness stage and inform those in the planning stage, as well as connect them to operators offering these products. As for the sharing stage, we found last year that people who hadalready visited the destination shared our videos after the fact with posts like “I’ve been there!” And as it did last year, we hope it will also engender pride in stakeholders.

Being behind the scenes of the filming really opened my eyes to the work required to produce high quality content in the wild. We had two videographers who have extensive experience in Greenland. MMP used a Red Camera, which was treated far better than any human member of the team, you can imagine what this means for 10km treks over the ice! Fragile as it was, the Red wasn’t allowed out in the rain – of which we had several days – requiring us to quickly adapt our plans. I also learned that good light appears at ungodly hours like 4:30 a.m.

The Red’s raw footage is stunning – and its clear to me that destinations can’t rely exclusively on user-generated content for their online videos, rather UGC needs to be complimented with authoritative, beautiful and professionally produced films – to show the destination at its best.  Furthermore, you don’t need a Turismo Mexico budget to pull this off – you need stakeholder buy-in (and in-kind donations) and excellent producers who already understand the destination and its conditions.

Although created for social media, we hope the films will be so good that they will be used in other places, such as on board Air Greenland and in hotel rooms. But ultimately, the goal is to ensure that instead of being lumped in with Iceland, these videos will help people have an accurate picture of Greenland today – a place of endless beauty, challenging adventures, breathtaking wilderness and resilient and resourceful people living in an arctic climate.