Last week I was in Lithuania teaching a course on Tourism Marketing specially designed to help the tourist authorities of this country increase the number of tourists arriving to their lands.
Lithuania, like many European countries, is struggling with the decline of the Russian market. Lithuania has lost 41% of GDP due to Russia's boycott of Europe and EU sanctions against Russian companies.
In terms of tourism, the negative impact of the anti-Russian campaign is even more worrying, as tourism revenues have fallen by 341% in 2015.
So this training was really important for them and for their tourism strategy both at public and private level.
Selling experiences instead of selling products or services
From the UNWTO (a United Nations agency dedicated to the development of countries through sustainable tourism) and the foundation Themis, a three-day course was prepared in which we would cover the following points:
- New emerging markets. This would allow Lithuania as a destination and Lithuanian tourism companies to better understand the markets that are currently growing and can provide them with more tourists.
- Practical workshop on creating tourist experiences. In this workshop we showed how we can create experiences that will last in the memory of visitors and the attendees worked on creating the experiences thinking especially about the tourists from emerging markets that we had worked with the day before.
- Practical workshop on Digital Marketing for tourism entitiesIn this workshop we showed how the main digital marketing tools work, both to attract traffic to a website and to convert it, and also to control the effectiveness of campaigns. The students actively participated in carrying out actions to publicize the experiences created the day before to the markets analyzed on the first day.
Everything went well. The students' evaluation of the course was very positive and the truth is that the experience of giving this workshop in Lithuania has also been very enriching. Lithuanians are wonderful people, somewhat shy, still with vestiges of the era in which they were part of the now extinct Soviet Union, and eager to learn and to make a place for themselves in world tourism.
Two things caught my attention:
- Lithuanians are obsessed (not a negative term) with roots tourism. On the first day of class, when we were discussing emerging markets and the class was asked to define market segments and create the “personas” associated with those segments, all the groups focused on targeting the descendants of Lithuanians who are residents of these emerging markets. This is something I have never encountered in class before – so much focus and effort on roots tourism and “bringing home” the descendants of emigrated Lithuanians.
- Lithuanians are super Catholic, but they love being the “last pagans in Europe.” All the working groups we created among the course participants, at some point, dealt with the topic of creating a set of experiences related to the fact that they were the last European nation to be Christianized. “The last pagans”… sounds like a movie… maybe they decide to do something like that… I don’t know…
In short… quite an experience. I hope to repeat it, even if only to expand the digital marketing aspect further, since both the hotels that attended and the destination managers who came to the course were left wanting to know more and to delve deeper into the tools that we showed them.
Here I leave you with a gallery of images with some photos of the course.
