Seychelles to map out tourism marketing strategy for next year

The Seychelles Tourism Board will be mapping out its marketing strategy for 2013 at its annual meeting that will take place this week, between December 11 and 14, 2012.

The biggest, if not the most important yearly meeting of the Seychelles Tourism Board, the marketing strategy meeting, will again be assembling all the directors and managers of the overseas Seychelles Tourism Offices, including locally-based marketing and other key staff of the Tourism Board. The Seychelles Tourism Board has also invited tourism trade partners from the various sectors of the industry to be part of the meeting.

The first two days of the meeting (December 11 and 12), will see participants of the 2013 marketing strategy meeting gather at the Seychelles Labriz Hilton Silhouette Resort & Spa, where the meeting will also be launched open.

The meeting will be launched on the morning of December 11, 2012, at 9:00 am, by the Minister of Tourism and Culture, Alain St.Ange, who will also be chairing the meeting alongside the Chief Executive Officer of the Seychelles Tourism Board, Elsia Grandcourt, whose opening remarks will set off the two days of strategizing sessions, focus groups, and discussions on the island of Silhouette.

The Seychelles Tourism Board team will, at this meeting, be presenting the 2012 quantitative analysis, assessing their 2012 marketing activities and looking at their achievements and challenges of this year. As is the case every year, the team will also be drawing up its marketing strategic plan that will take the islands through another year of consolidating its position as a serious tourism destination.

The outcome of the first two days of the meeting on Silhouette Island will be collated as the marketing strategy 2013, and this plan of action will be presented by the Seychelles Tourism Board in a presentation that will be held at the ICCS Convention Centre in Victoria on Thursday, December 13, 2012, from 1500 hours to 1700 hours.

The meeting will continue the following day, December 14, 2012, with internal work sessions, which includes the fine tuning of the 2013 Marketing Strategy, at the Seychelles Tourism Board Office in Bel Ombre.

The Marketing Strategy Meeting has been accepted as the ideal platform for the directors and managers of the Seychelles Tourism Offices to meet with the tourism trade partners to discuss the strategic approach to increase visitor arrivals numbers as well as the return on tourism spending, including addressing various challenges of the industry and the best way to tackle them. Assessing the continuous trends and change in visitors’ needs is also debated at these meeting where recent survey data is tabled as backup for the discussions.

The annual Tourism Board Marketing Meeting is also the opportunity for the Tourism Board’s Marketing Team to merge ideas to further raise the profile of Seychelles as a tourism destination as they receive their 2013 budget allocation as has been tabled last week to the National Assembly by the island’s Minister responsible for Finance, Mr. Pierre Laporte.

Following this meeting, a Seychelles Tourism Marketing Plan will be printed as has been done annually for the last couple of years and will be tabled in the new year to the Cabinet of Ministers.

Seychelles is a founding member of the International Coalition of Tourism Partners (ICTP).