Destination marketing ? a real dilemma for many Scottish hotels and accommodation providers

Here is only one set of truisms about Scottish destination marketing – - – - -

It is completely underfunded

It is riddled with market failure in some destinations within Scotland

The national marketing organisation continues to be a joke

The general standard of destination marketing in Scotland, including the country itself, is nothing short of pathetic (with a few exceptions)

Destination marketing on the whole does not give potential visitors what they want to hear, it is far too much about the destination rather than the visitor

Some marketing ‘destinations’ are simply wrong – Ayrshire and Arran is a great example, two destinations with nothing in common

The whole needs to be greater than the sum of the parts – the Ayrshire/Arran above is an example of it being less

Consequently, the temptation is for many accommodation businesses, especially online, to try single handedly to try to leverage their destination for the benefit of the business, when these businesses have no expertise in destination marketing, its not their bag.

Innfinite has a proven destination strategy level solution for all its clients in this whole field, which not only saves accommodation websites padding out oodles of content about every conceivable destination attraction and strength on their websites, and also encourages channel shift away ftrom high cost intermediaries and OTA’s , but also allowing them to totally focus the website on the direct selling of rooms, which is what over 90% of the travel shopper Joe publics out there today, business or leisure, want them to do, simply and effectively.

The situation is no better on the meetings and events side. Again, given the track record of the Convention Bureaux on line, Innfinite not only provides exactly the kind of solution and RFP structure event and meetings organisers want – but is also working on a totally new and revolutionary way to sell potent, value added combinations of meeting venues and event content to the market, an approach which is sadly lacking in practice – for more, see our blog www.meetingsthatcount.com

Years and years of listening to travel shoppers and customers has enabled us to provide mission critical, up to the minute, fully optimised conversion and results/yield based web development, sales, marketing and ecommerce solutions.

Scotland is a wonderful place to be in as a visitor, with wonderful character and welcoming and friendly people. This is hugely well documented but is shunned by destination management agencies who often focus on all the logistics and the structural visitor issues, rather than the persona. Scotland travel marketing needs a persona, and has one of which it can be proud, yet hardly ever uses it.