How do you communicate as a destination marketing organisation during the covid-19 pandemic.
Goals:
- Let travelers dream about your destination as their next holiday location.
- Building trust, by showing your destination cares and protects the health of travelers and citizens .
- Showing measures that your destination is doing it’s part to help the world to over win this crisis.
- Be an authoritative information source for press, stakeholders and travellers
How:
- Create a corona information page where you share the latest covid-19 information that helps travelers to your destination to understand what is done to protect their health, the status of leisure and activity sector, possibillty of having a great holiday.
- Communicate your plan to reopen, what are the different phases your destination defined.
- Send out press releases each time your destination takes news measurements to protect travelers and citizens or helps businesses to recover.
- Put Travelers first (Everyone is suffering) - Build Trust, be sensitive, show empathy, compassion and care about the health and situations of travelers. Be helpful with providing them the best possible information. Trust is important to build up confidence in travelers which will lead to a faster recovery.
Example of destinations putting travelers first on their information pages:
- Visit Singapore : STB is stepping up on precautionary measures for your safety and well-being. (https://www.stb.gov.sg/content/stb/en.html)
- British Columbia: Like you, we’re passionate about exploring BC. But now is not the time to travel. Please stay home and follow the advice of health authorities. Do your part now, so we can all explore BC again later. In the meantime, find the official links below for the most up-to-date information. https://www.hellobc.com/
- Try to bond - we are in this together
- Thailand Tourism: showed it’s doing their part by adding distance in their logo : supporting social distancing.
- Singapore: As the situation has deteriorated globally, we have strengthened our measures accordingly to protect Singaporeans and do our part in the worldwide effort against COVID-19. (https://www.visitsingapore.com/about-singapore/traveller-information/novel-coronavirus-pneumonia-advisory/)
- Coca cola on Times Square New York
- Portugal: It's time to stop. It's time to take a break, for the good of the world. In the meantime, we can dream for the great days to come. We're in this together.
- Show Myanmar is following advice of WHO & UNWTO and other partners
- Myanmar is already doing that, it could be more clear its following the advice of these leading institution:
- Example Canada : The Public Health Agency of Canada is leading national efforts to contain the outbreak of COVID-19 (coronavirus) and working with the World Health Organization and other international partners.
- Have a link in the header and footer of tourisminmyanmar.mm to the corona page as well.
- Update your information on a daily basis (things move extremely fast).
- Many more changes are likely to unfold in the coming weeks, which means moht needs to constantly adapt to the current situation and adjust marketing strategies as needed.
