Tourism is one of the UK’s biggest industries, contributing billions to the economy and creating millions of jobs and the lengths that some companies go to to tap into this lucrative market are surprising – but the data also suggests that you don’t always need big budgets to market your tourism business effectively.
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1. Hawaii’s total tourism advertising and promotion budget was $82,000,000 in 2014, the largest for any state in the United States (Source: U.S. Travel Association).
2. The biggest tourism organisation on Facebook is the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, with 1.3m likes (https://www.facebook.com/metmuseum).
3. There are as many Google searches in the UK for ‘weekend breaks UK’ in January as there are in July (Google Adwords, 2015).
4. New Zealand’s Government-funded marketing body has switched off the advertising budget for Summer as hotels and other accommodation providers report that they’re full – the focus will instead shift to the shoulder months in Spring and Autumn (http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/68682138/Tourism-New-Zealand-switching-off-the-marketing-budget-for-summer-to-focus-on-lower-seasons)
5. The value of tourism to the UK is £126.9bn (VisitBritain, 2014)
6. The UK is the eighth largest international tourism destination ranked by visitor numbers (UNWTO Tourism Highlights, 2014 edition).
7. Tourism-related employment now accounts for 3.1m jobs in the UK – this is almost 10% of the entire UK workforce (VisitBritain, 2014).
8. The ‘greatest job in the world’ PR campaign in 2009, which advertised a job in Queensland as an island caretaker, reportedly generated over £49m of equivalent media advertising space.
9. Almost 70% of tourism and hospitality businesses employ fewer than 10 people (Employer Skills Survey, UK Commission for Employment and Skills, 2013)
10. There are 262,268 tourism businesses in the UK (Office for National Statistics, 2014)
11. 59% of the UK population have active social media accounts (WeAreSocial, 2015).
12. £18.1bn is spent by British residents on 92.6 million overnight trips in England (VisitEngland, 2014).
13. You have less than 15 seconds to grab a visitor’s attention when they visit your website – so if you’ve got this far, thank you (Tony Haile of Chartbeat, 2014).
Need help marketing your tourism business? Let me help you to fill your rooms or holiday cottages, so you get your weekends and evenings back.